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Violence, media effects, and criminology.

Nickie D. Phillips Nickie D. Phillips Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, St. Francis College
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.013.189
Published online: 27 July 2017

Debate surrounding the impact of media representations on violence and crime has raged for decades and shows no sign of abating. Over the years, the targets of concern have shifted from film to comic books to television to video games, but the central questions remain the same. What is the relationship between popular media and audience emotions, attitudes, and behaviors? While media effects research covers a vast range of topics—from the study of its persuasive effects in advertising to its positive impact on emotions and behaviors—of particular interest to criminologists is the relationship between violence in popular media and real-life aggression and violence. Does media violence cause aggression and/or violence?

The study of media effects is informed by a variety of theoretical perspectives and spans many disciplines including communications and media studies, psychology, medicine, sociology, and criminology. Decades of research have amassed on the topic, yet there is no clear agreement about the impact of media or about which methodologies are most appropriate. Instead, there continues to be disagreement about whether media portrayals of violence are a serious problem and, if so, how society should respond.

Conflicting interpretations of research findings inform and shape public debate around media effects. Although there seems to be a consensus among scholars that exposure to media violence impacts aggression, there is less agreement around its potential impact on violence and criminal behavior. While a few criminologists focus on the phenomenon of copycat crimes, most rarely engage with whether media directly causes violence. Instead, they explore broader considerations of the relationship between media, popular culture, and society.

media exposure
criminal behavior
popular culture
media violence
media and crime
copycat crimes

Media Exposure, Violence, and Aggression

On Friday July 22, 2016 , a gunman killed nine people at a mall in Munich, Germany. The 18-year-old shooter was subsequently characterized by the media as being under psychiatric care and harboring at least two obsessions. One, an obsession with mass shootings, including that of Anders Breivik who ultimately killed 77 people in Norway in 2011 , and the other an obsession with video games. A Los Angeles, California, news report stated that the gunman was “an avid player of first-person shooter video games, including ‘Counter-Strike,’” while another headline similarly declared, “Munich gunman, a fan of violent video games, rampage killers, had planned attack for a year”(CNN Wire, 2016 ; Reuters, 2016 ). This high-profile incident was hardly the first to link popular culture to violent crime. Notably, in the aftermath of the 1999 Columbine shooting massacre, for example, media sources implicated and later discredited music, video games, and a gothic aesthetic as causal factors of the crime (Cullen, 2009 ; Yamato, 2016 ). Other, more recent, incidents have echoed similar claims suggesting that popular culture has a nefarious influence on consumers.

Media violence and its impact on audiences are among the most researched and examined topics in communications studies (Hetsroni, 2007 ). Yet, debate over whether media violence causes aggression and violence persists, particularly in response to high-profile criminal incidents. Blaming video games, and other forms of media and popular culture, as contributing to violence is not a new phenomenon. However, interpreting media effects can be difficult because commenters often seem to indicate a grand consensus that understates more contradictory and nuanced interpretations of the data.

In fact, there is a consensus among many media researchers that media violence has an impact on aggression although its impact on violence is less clear. For example, in response to the shooting in Munich, Brad Bushman, professor of communication and psychology, avoided pinning the incident solely on video games, but in the process supported the assertion that video gameplay is linked to aggression. He stated,

While there isn’t complete consensus in any scientific field, a study we conducted showed more than 90% of pediatricians and about two-thirds of media researchers surveyed agreed that violent video games increase aggression in children. (Bushman, 2016 )

Others, too, have reached similar conclusions with regard to other media. In 2008 , psychologist John Murray summarized decades of research stating, “Fifty years of research on the effect of TV violence on children leads to the inescapable conclusion that viewing media violence is related to increases in aggressive attitudes, values, and behaviors” (Murray, 2008 , p. 1212). Scholars Glenn Sparks and Cheri Sparks similarly declared that,

Despite the fact that controversy still exists about the impact of media violence, the research results reveal a dominant and consistent pattern in favor of the notion that exposure to violent media images does increase the risk of aggressive behavior. (Sparks & Sparks, 2002 , p. 273)

In 2014 , psychologist Wayne Warburton more broadly concluded that the vast majority of studies have found “that exposure to violent media increases the likelihood of aggressive behavior in the short and longterm, increases hostile perceptions and attitudes, and desensitizes individuals to violent content” (Warburton, 2014 , p. 64).

Criminologists, too, are sensitive to the impact of media exposure. For example, Jacqueline Helfgott summarized the research:

There have been over 1000 studies on the effects of TV and film violence over the past 40 years. Research on the influence of TV violence on aggression has consistently shown that TV violence increases aggression and social anxiety, cultivates a “mean view” of the world, and negatively impacts real-world behavior. (Helfgott, 2015 , p. 50)

In his book, Media Coverage of Crime and Criminal Justice , criminologist Matthew Robinson stated, “Studies of the impact of media on violence are crystal clear in their findings and implications for society” (Robinson, 2011 , p. 135). He cited studies on childhood exposure to violent media leading to aggressive behavior as evidence. In his pioneering book Media, Crime, and Criminal Justice , criminologist Ray Surette concurred that media violence is linked to aggression, but offered a nuanced interpretation. He stated,

a small to modest but genuine causal role for media violence regarding viewer aggression has been established for most beyond a reasonable doubt . . . There is certainly a connection between violent media and social aggression, but its strength and configuration is simply not known at this time. (Surette, 2011 , p. 68)

The uncertainties about the strength of the relationship and the lack of evidence linking media violence to real-world violence is often lost in the news media accounts of high-profile violent crimes.

Media Exposure and Copycat Crimes

While many scholars do seem to agree that there is evidence that media violence—whether that of film, TV, or video games—increases aggression, they disagree about its impact on violent or criminal behavior (Ferguson, 2014 ; Gunter, 2008 ; Helfgott, 2015 ; Reiner, 2002 ; Savage, 2008 ). Nonetheless, it is violent incidents that most often prompt speculation that media causes violence. More specifically, violence that appears to mimic portrayals of violent media tends to ignite controversy. For example, the idea that films contribute to violent crime is not a new assertion. Films such as A Clockwork Orange , Menace II Society , Set it Off , and Child’s Play 3 , have been linked to crimes and at least eight murders have been linked to Oliver Stone’s 1994 film Natural Born Killers (Bracci, 2010 ; Brooks, 2002 ; PBS, n.d. ). Nonetheless, pinpointing a direct, causal relationship between media and violent crime remains elusive.

Criminologist Jacqueline Helfgott defined copycat crime as a “crime that is inspired by another crime” (Helfgott, 2015 , p. 51). The idea is that offenders model their behavior on media representations of violence whether real or fictional. One case, in particular, illustrated how popular culture, media, and criminal violence converge. On July 20, 2012 , James Holmes entered the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises , the third film in the massively successful Batman trilogy, in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. He shot and killed 12 people and wounded 70 others. At the time, the New York Times described the incident,

Witnesses told the police that Mr. Holmes said something to the effect of “I am the Joker,” according to a federal law enforcement official, and that his hair had been dyed or he was wearing a wig. Then, as people began to rise from their seats in confusion or anxiety, he began to shoot. The gunman paused at least once, several witnesses said, perhaps to reload, and continued firing. (Frosch & Johnson, 2012 ).

The dyed hair, Holme’s alleged comment, and that the incident occurred at a popular screening led many to speculate that the shooter was influenced by the earlier film in the trilogy and reignited debate around the impact about media violence. The Daily Mail pointed out that Holmes may have been motivated by a 25-year-old Batman comic in which a gunman opens fire in a movie theater—thus further suggesting the iconic villain served as motivation for the attack (Graham & Gallagher, 2012 ). Perceptions of the “Joker connection” fed into the notion that popular media has a direct causal influence on violent behavior even as press reports later indicated that Holmes had not, in fact, made reference to the Joker (Meyer, 2015 ).

A week after the Aurora shooting, the New York Daily News published an article detailing a “possible copycat” crime. A suspect was arrested in his Maryland home after making threatening phone calls to his workplace. The article reported that the suspect stated, “I am a [sic] joker” and “I’m going to load my guns and blow everybody up.” In their search, police found “a lethal arsenal of 25 guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition” in the suspect’s home (McShane, 2012 ).

Though criminologists are generally skeptical that those who commit violent crimes are motivated solely by media violence, there does seem to be some evidence that media may be influential in shaping how some offenders commit crime. In his study of serious and violent juvenile offenders, criminologist Ray Surette found “about one out of three juveniles reports having considered a copycat crime and about one out of four reports actually having attempted one.” He concluded that “those juveniles who are self-reported copycats are significantly more likely to credit the media as both a general and personal influence.” Surette contended that though violent offenses garner the most media attention, copycat criminals are more likely to be career criminals and to commit property crimes rather than violent crimes (Surette, 2002 , pp. 56, 63; Surette 2011 ).

Discerning what crimes may be classified as copycat crimes is a challenge. Jacqueline Helfgott suggested they occur on a “continuum of influence.” On one end, she said, media plays a relatively minor role in being a “component of the modus operandi” of the offender, while on the other end, she said, “personality disordered media junkies” have difficulty distinguishing reality from violent fantasy. According to Helfgott, various factors such as individual characteristics, characteristics of media sources, relationship to media, demographic factors, and cultural factors are influential. Overall, scholars suggest that rather than pushing unsuspecting viewers to commit crimes, media more often influences how , rather than why, someone commits a crime (Helfgott, 2015 ; Marsh & Melville, 2014 ).

Given the public interest, there is relatively little research devoted to exactly what copycat crimes are and how they occur. Part of the problem of studying these types of crimes is the difficulty defining and measuring the concept. In an effort to clarify and empirically measure the phenomenon, Surette offered a scale that included seven indicators of copycat crimes. He used the following factors to identify copycat crimes: time order (media exposure must occur before the crime); time proximity (a five-year cut-off point of exposure); theme consistency (“a pattern of thought, feeling or behavior in the offender which closely parallels the media model”); scene specificity (mimicking a specific scene); repetitive viewing; self-editing (repeated viewing of single scene while “the balance of the film is ignored”); and offender statements and second-party statements indicating the influence of media. Findings demonstrated that cases are often prematurely, if not erroneously, labeled as “copycat.” Surette suggested that use of the scale offers a more precise way for researchers to objectively measure trends and frequency of copycat crimes (Surette, 2016 , p. 8).

Media Exposure and Violent Crimes

Overall, a causal link between media exposure and violent criminal behavior has yet to be validated, and most researchers steer clear of making such causal assumptions. Instead, many emphasize that media does not directly cause aggression and violence so much as operate as a risk factor among other variables (Bushman & Anderson, 2015 ; Warburton, 2014 ). In their review of media effects, Brad Bushman and psychologist Craig Anderson concluded,

In sum, extant research shows that media violence is a causal risk factor not only for mild forms of aggression but also for more serious forms of aggression, including violent criminal behavior. That does not mean that violent media exposure by itself will turn a normal child or adolescent who has few or no other risk factors into a violent criminal or a school shooter. Such extreme violence is rare, and tends to occur only when multiple risk factors converge in time, space, and within an individual. (Bushman & Anderson, 2015 , p. 1817)

Surette, however, argued that there is no clear linkage between media exposure and criminal behavior—violent or otherwise. In other words, a link between media violence and aggression does not necessarily mean that exposure to violent media causes violent (or nonviolent) criminal behavior. Though there are thousands of articles addressing media effects, many of these consist of reviews or commentary about prior research findings rather than original studies (Brown, 2007 ; Murray, 2008 ; Savage, 2008 ; Surette, 2011 ). Fewer, still, are studies that specifically measure media violence and criminal behavior (Gunter, 2008 ; Strasburger & Donnerstein, 2014 ). In their meta-analysis investigating the link between media violence and criminal aggression, scholars Joanne Savage and Christina Yancey did not find support for the assertion. Instead, they concluded,

The study of most consequence for violent crime policy actually found that exposure to media violence was significantly negatively related to violent crime rates at the aggregate level . . . It is plain to us that the relationship between exposure to violent media and serious violence has yet to be established. (Savage & Yancey, 2008 , p. 786)

Researchers continue to measure the impact of media violence among various forms of media and generally stop short of drawing a direct causal link in favor of more indirect effects. For example, one study examined the increase of gun violence in films over the years and concluded that violent scenes provide scripts for youth that justify gun violence that, in turn, may amplify aggression (Bushman, Jamieson, Weitz, & Romer, 2013 ). But others report contradictory findings. Patrick Markey and colleagues studied the relationship between rates of homicide and aggravated assault and gun violence in films from 1960–2012 and found that over the years, violent content in films increased while crime rates declined . After controlling for age shifts, poverty, education, incarceration rates, and economic inequality, the relationships remained statistically non-significant (Markey, French, & Markey, 2015 , p. 165). Psychologist Christopher Ferguson also failed to find a relationship between media violence in films and video games and violence (Ferguson, 2014 ).

Another study, by Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna, examined violent films from 1995–2004 and found decreases in violent crimes coincided with violent blockbuster movie attendance. Here, it was not the content that was alleged to impact crime rates, but instead what the authors called “voluntary incapacitation,” or the shifting of daily activities from that of potential criminal behavior to movie attendance. The authors concluded, “For each million people watching a strongly or mildly violent movie, respectively, violent crime decreases by 1.9% and 2.1%. Nonviolent movies have no statistically significant impact” (Dahl & DellaVigna, p. 39).

High-profile cases over the last several years have shifted public concern toward the perceived danger of video games, but research demonstrating a link between video games and criminal violence remains scant. The American Psychiatric Association declared that “research demonstrates a consistent relation between violent video game use and increases in aggressive behavior, aggressive cognitions and aggressive affect, and decreases in prosocial behavior, empathy and sensitivity to aggression . . .” but stopped short of claiming that video games impact criminal violence. According to Breuer and colleagues, “While all of the available meta-analyses . . . found a relationship between aggression and the use of (violent) video games, the size and interpretation of this connection differ largely between these studies . . .” (APA, 2015 ; Breuer et al., 2015 ; DeCamp, 2015 ). Further, psychologists Patrick Markey, Charlotte Markey, and Juliana French conducted four time-series analyses investigating the relationship between video game habits and assault and homicide rates. The studies measured rates of violent crime, the annual and monthly video game sales, Internet searches for video game walkthroughs, and rates of violent crime occurring after the release dates of popular games. The results showed that there was no relationship between video game habits and rates of aggravated assault and homicide. Instead, there was some indication of decreases in crime (Markey, Markey, & French, 2015 ).

Another longitudinal study failed to find video games as a predictor of aggression, instead finding support for the “selection hypothesis”—that physically aggressive individuals (aged 14–17) were more likely to choose media content that contained violence than those slightly older, aged 18–21. Additionally, the researchers concluded,

that violent media do not have a substantial impact on aggressive personality or behavior, at least in the phases of late adolescence and early adulthood that we focused on. (Breuer, Vogelgesang, Quandt, & Festl, 2015 , p. 324)

Overall, the lack of a consistent finding demonstrating that media exposure causes violent crime may not be particularly surprising given that studies linking media exposure, aggression, and violence suffer from a host of general criticisms. By way of explanation, social theorist David Gauntlett maintained that researchers frequently employ problematic definitions of aggression and violence, questionable methodologies, rely too much on fictional violence, neglect the social meaning of violence, and assume the third-person effect—that is, assume that other, vulnerable people are impacted by media, but “we” are not (Ferguson & Dyck, 2012 ; Gauntlett, 2001 ).

Others, such as scholars Martin Barker and Julian Petley, flatly reject the notion that violent media exposure is a causal factor for aggression and/or violence. In their book Ill Effects , the authors stated instead that it is simply “stupid” to query about “what are the effects of [media] violence” without taking context into account (p. 2). They counter what they describe as moral campaigners who advance the idea that media violence causes violence. Instead, Barker and Petley argue that audiences interpret media violence in a variety of ways based on their histories, experiences, and knowledge, and as such, it makes little sense to claim media “cause” violence (Barker & Petley, 2001 ).

Given the seemingly inconclusive and contradictory findings regarding media effects research, to say that the debate can, at times, be contentious is an understatement. One article published in European Psychologist queried “Does Doing Media Violence Research Make One Aggressive?” and lamented that the debate had devolved into an ideological one (Elson & Ferguson, 2013 ). Another academic journal published a special issue devoted to video games and youth and included a transcript of exchanges between two scholars to demonstrate that a “peaceful debate” was, in fact, possible (Ferguson & Konijn, 2015 ).

Nonetheless, in this debate, the stakes are high and the policy consequences profound. After examining over 900 published articles, publication patterns, prominent authors and coauthors, and disciplinary interest in the topic, scholar James Anderson argued that prominent media effects scholars, whom he deems the “causationists,” had developed a cottage industry dependent on funding by agencies focused primarily on the negative effects of media on children. Anderson argued that such a focus presents media as a threat to family values and ultimately operates as a zero-sum game. As a result, attention and resources are diverted toward media and away from other priorities that are essential to understanding aggression such as social disadvantage, substance abuse, and parental conflict (Anderson, 2008 , p. 1276).

Theoretical Perspectives on Media Effects

Understanding how media may impact attitudes and behavior has been the focus of media and communications studies for decades. Numerous theoretical perspectives offer insight into how and to what extent the media impacts the audience. As scholar Jenny Kitzinger documented in 2004 , there are generally two ways to approach the study of media effects. One is to foreground the power of media. That is, to suggest that the media holds powerful sway over viewers. Another perspective is to foreground the power and heterogeneity of the audience and to recognize that it is comprised of active agents (Kitzinger, 2004 ).

The notion of an all-powerful media can be traced to the influence of scholars affiliated with the Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School, in the 1930–1940s and proponents of the mass society theory. The institute was originally founded in Germany but later moved to the United States. Criminologist Yvonne Jewkes outlined how mass society theory assumed that members of the public were susceptible to media messages. This, theorists argued, was a result of rapidly changing social conditions and industrialization that produced isolated, impressionable individuals “cut adrift from kinship and organic ties and lacking moral cohesion” (Jewkes, 2015 , p. 13). In this historical context, in the era of World War II, the impact of Nazi propaganda was particularly resonant. Here, the media was believed to exhibit a unidirectional flow, operating as a powerful force influencing the masses. The most useful metaphor for this perspective described the media as a “hypodermic syringe” that could “‘inject’ values, ideas and information directly into the passive receiver producing direct and unmediated ‘effects’” (Jewkes, 2015 , pp. 16, 34). Though the hypodermic syringe model seems simplistic today, the idea that the media is all-powerful continues to inform contemporary public discourse around media and violence.

Concern of the power of media captured the attention of researchers interested in its purported negative impact on children. In one of the earliest series of studies in the United States during the late 1920s–1930s, researchers attempted to quantitatively measure media effects with the Payne Fund Studies. For example, they investigated how film, a relatively new medium, impacted children’s attitudes and behaviors, including antisocial and violent behavior. At the time, the Payne Fund Studies’ findings fueled the notion that children were indeed negatively influenced by films. This prompted the film industry to adopt a self-imposed code regulating content (Sparks & Sparks, 2002 ; Surette, 2011 ). Not everyone agreed with the approach. In fact, the methodologies employed in the studies received much criticism, and ultimately, the movement was branded as a moral crusade to regulate film content. Scholars Garth Jowett, Ian Jarvie, and Kathryn Fuller wrote about the significance of the studies,

We have seen this same policy battle fought and refought over radio, television, rock and roll, music videos and video games. Their researchers looked to see if intuitive concerns could be given concrete, measurable expression in research. While they had partial success, as have all subsequent efforts, they also ran into intractable problems . . . Since that day, no way has yet been found to resolve the dilemma of cause and effect: do crime movies create more crime, or do the criminally inclined enjoy and perhaps imitate crime movies? (Jowett, Jarvie, & Fuller, 1996 , p. 12)

As the debate continued, more sophisticated theoretical perspectives emerged. Efforts to empirically measure the impact of media on aggression and violence continued, albeit with equivocal results. In the 1950s and 1960s, psychological behaviorism, or understanding psychological motivations through observable behavior, became a prominent lens through which to view the causal impact of media violence. This type of research was exemplified by Albert Bandura’s Bobo Doll studies demonstrating that children exposed to aggressive behavior, either observed in real life or on film, behaved more aggressively than those in control groups who were not exposed to the behavior. The assumption derived was that children learn through exposure and imitate behavior (Bandura, Ross, & Ross, 1963 ). Though influential, the Bandura experiments were nevertheless heavily criticized. Some argued the laboratory conditions under which children were exposed to media were not generalizable to real-life conditions. Others challenged the assumption that children absorb media content in an unsophisticated manner without being able to distinguish between fantasy and reality. In fact, later studies did find children to be more discerning consumers of media than popularly believed (Gauntlett, 2001 ).

Hugely influential in our understandings of human behavior, the concept of social learning has been at the core of more contemporary understandings of media effects. For example, scholar Christopher Ferguson noted that the General Aggression Model (GAM), rooted in social learning and cognitive theory, has for decades been a dominant model for understanding how media impacts aggression and violence. GAM is described as the idea that “aggression is learned by the activation and repetition of cognitive scripts coupled with the desensitization of emotional responses due to repeated exposure.” However, Ferguson noted that its usefulness has been debated and advocated for a paradigm shift (Ferguson, 2013 , pp. 65, 27; Krahé, 2014 ).

Though the methodologies of the Payne Fund Studies and Bandura studies were heavily criticized, concern over media effects continued to be tied to larger moral debates including the fear of moral decline and concern over the welfare of children. Most notably, in the 1950s, psychiatrist Frederic Wertham warned of the dangers of comic books, a hugely popular medium at the time, and their impact on juveniles. Based on anecdotes and his clinical experience with children, Wertham argued that images of graphic violence and sexual debauchery in comic books were linked to juvenile delinquency. Though he was far from the only critic of comic book content, his criticisms reached the masses and gained further notoriety with the publication of his 1954 book, Seduction of the Innocent . Wertham described the comic book content thusly,

The stories have a lot of crime and gunplay and, in addition, alluring advertisements of guns, some of them full-page and in bright colors, with four guns of various sizes and descriptions on a page . . . Here is the repetition of violence and sexiness which no Freud, Krafft-Ebing or Havelock Ellis ever dreamed could be offered to children, and in such profusion . . . I have come to the conclusion that this chronic stimulation, temptation and seduction by comic books, both their content and their alluring advertisements of knives and guns, are contributing factors to many children’s maladjustment. (Wertham, 1954 , p. 39)

Wertham’s work was instrumental in shaping public opinion and policies about the dangers of comic books. Concern about the impact of comics reached its apex in 1954 with the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. Wertham testified before the committee, arguing that comics were a leading cause of juvenile delinquency. Ultimately, the protest of graphic content in comic books by various interest groups contributed to implementation of the publishers’ self-censorship code, the Comics Code Authority, which essentially designated select books that were deemed “safe” for children (Nyberg, 1998 ). The code remained in place for decades, though it was eventually relaxed and decades later phased out by the two most dominant publishers, DC and Marvel.

Wertham’s work, however influential in impacting the comic industry, was ultimately panned by academics. Although scholar Bart Beaty characterized Wertham’s position as more nuanced, if not progressive, than the mythology that followed him, Wertham was broadly dismissed as a moral reactionary (Beaty, 2005 ; Phillips & Strobl, 2013 ). The most damning criticism of Wertham’s work came decades later, from Carol Tilley’s examination of Wertham’s files. She concluded that in Seduction of the Innocent ,

Wertham manipulated, overstated, compromised, and fabricated evidence—especially that evidence he attributed to personal clinical research with young people—for rhetorical gain. (Tilley, 2012 , p. 386)

Tilley linked Wertham’s approach to that of the Frankfurt theorists who deemed popular culture a social threat and contended that Wertham was most interested in “cultural correction” rather than scientific inquiry (Tilley, 2012 , p. 404).

Over the decades, concern about the moral impact of media remained while theoretical and methodological approaches to media effects studies continued to evolve (Rich, Bickham, & Wartella, 2015 ). In what many consider a sophisticated development, theorists began to view the audience as more active and multifaceted than the mass society perspective allowed (Kitzinger, 2004 ). One perspective, based on a “uses and gratifications” model, assumes that rather than a passive audience being injected with values and information, a more active audience selects and “uses” media as a response to their needs and desires. Studies of uses and gratifications take into account how choice of media is influenced by one’s psychological and social circumstances. In this context, media provides a variety of functions for consumers who may engage with it for the purposes of gathering information, reducing boredom, seeking enjoyment, or facilitating communication (Katz, Blumler, & Gurevitch, 1973 ; Rubin, 2002 ). This approach differs from earlier views in that it privileges the perspective and agency of the audience.

Another approach, the cultivation theory, gained momentum among researchers in the 1970s and has been of particular interest to criminologists. It focuses on how television television viewing impacts viewers’ attitudes toward social reality. The theory was first introduced by communications scholar George Gerbner, who argued the importance of understanding messages that long-term viewers absorb. Rather than examine the effect of specific content within any given programming, cultivation theory,

looks at exposure to massive flows of messages over long periods of time. The cultivation process takes place in the interaction of the viewer with the message; neither the message nor the viewer are all-powerful. (Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, Singnorielli, & Shanahan, 2002 , p. 48)

In other words, he argued, television viewers are, over time, exposed to messages about the way the world works. As Gerbner and colleagues stated, “continued exposure to its messages is likely to reiterate, confirm, and nourish—that is, cultivate—its own values and perspectives” (p. 49).

One of the most well-known consequences of heavy media exposure is what Gerbner termed the “mean world” syndrome. He coined it based on studies that found that long-term exposure to media violence among heavy television viewers, “tends to cultivate the image of a relatively mean and dangerous world” (p. 52). Inherent in Gerbner’s view was that media representations are separate and distinct entities from “real life.” That is, it is the distorted representations of crime and violence that cultivate the notion that the world is a dangerous place. In this context, Gerbner found that heavy television viewers are more likely to be fearful of crime and to overestimate their chances of being a victim of violence (Gerbner, 1994 ).

Though there is evidence in support of cultivation theory, the strength of the relationship between media exposure and fear of crime is inconclusive. This is in part due to the recognition that audience members are not homogenous. Instead, researchers have found that there are many factors that impact the cultivating process. This includes, but is not limited to, “class, race, gender, place of residence, and actual experience of crime” (Reiner, 2002 ; Sparks, 1992 ). Or, as Ted Chiricos and colleagues remarked in their study of crime news and fear of crime, “The issue is not whether media accounts of crime increase fear, but which audiences, with which experiences and interests, construct which meanings from the messages received” (Chiricos, Eschholz, & Gertz, p. 354).

Other researchers found that exposure to media violence creates a desensitizing effect, that is, that as viewers consume more violent media, they become less empathetic as well as psychologically and emotionally numb when confronted with actual violence (Bartholow, Bushman, & Sestir, 2006 ; Carnagey, Anderson, & Bushman, 2007 ; Cline, Croft, & Courrier, 1973 ; Fanti, Vanman, Henrich, & Avraamides, 2009 ; Krahé et al., 2011 ). Other scholars such as Henry Giroux, however, point out that our contemporary culture is awash in violence and “everyone is infected.” From this perspective, the focus is not on certain individuals whose exposure to violent media leads to a desensitization of real-life violence, but rather on the notion that violence so permeates society that it has become normalized in ways that are divorced from ethical and moral implications. Giroux wrote,

While it would be wrong to suggest that the violence that saturates popular culture directly causes violence in the larger society, it is arguable that such violence serves not only to produce an insensitivity to real life violence but also functions to normalize violence as both a source of pleasure and as a practice for addressing social issues. When young people and others begin to believe that a world of extreme violence, vengeance, lawlessness, and revenge is the only world they inhabit, the culture and practice of real-life violence is more difficult to scrutinize, resist, and transform . . . (Giroux, 2015 )

For Giroux, the danger is that the normalization of violence has become a threat to democracy itself. In our culture of mass consumption shaped by neoliberal logics, depoliticized narratives of violence have become desired forms of entertainment and are presented in ways that express tolerance for some forms of violence while delegitimizing other forms of violence. In their book, Disposable Futures , Brad Evans and Henry Giroux argued that as the spectacle of violence perpetuates fear of inevitable catastrophe, it reinforces expansion of police powers, increased militarization and other forms of social control, and ultimately renders marginalized members of the populace disposable (Evans & Giroux, 2015 , p. 81).

Criminology and the “Media/Crime Nexus”

Most criminologists and sociologists who focus on media and crime are generally either dismissive of the notion that media violence directly causes violence or conclude that findings are more complex than traditional media effects models allow, preferring to focus attention on the impact of media violence on society rather than individual behavior (Carrabine, 2008 ; Ferrell, Hayward, & Young, 2015 ; Jewkes, 2015 ; Kitzinger, 2004 ; Marsh & Melville, 2014 ; Rafter, 2006 ; Sternheimer, 2003 ; Sternheimer 2013 ; Surette, 2011 ). Sociologist Karen Sternheimer forcefully declared “media culture is not the root cause of American social problems, not the Big Bad Wolf, as our ongoing public discussion would suggest” (Sternheimer, 2003 , p. 3). Sternheimer rejected the idea that media causes violence and argued that a false connection has been forged between media, popular culture, and violence. Like others critical of a singular focus on media, Sternheimer posited that overemphasis on the perceived dangers of media violence serves as a red herring that directs attention away from the actual causes of violence rooted in factors such as poverty, family violence, abuse, and economic inequalities (Sternheimer, 2003 , 2013 ). Similarly, in her Media and Crime text, Yvonne Jewkes stated that U.K. scholars tend to reject findings of a causal link because the studies are too reductionist; criminal behavior cannot be reduced to a single causal factor such as media consumption. Echoing Gauntlett’s critiques of media effects research, Jewkes stated that simplistic causal assumptions ignore “the wider context of a lifetime of meaning-making” (Jewkes, 2015 , p. 17).

Although they most often reject a “violent media cause violence” relationship, criminologists do not dismiss the notion of media as influential. To the contrary, over the decades much criminological interest has focused on the construction of social problems, the ideological implications of media, and media’s potential impact on crime policies and social control. Eamonn Carrabine noted that the focus of concern is not whether media directly causes violence but on “how the media promote damaging stereotypes of social groups, especially the young, to uphold the status quo” (Carrabine, 2008 , p. 34). Theoretically, these foci have been traced to the influence of cultural and Marxist studies. For example, criminologists frequently focus on how social anxieties and class inequalities impact our understandings of the relationship between media violence and attitudes, values, and behaviors. Influential works in the 1970s, such as Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order by Stuart Hall et al. and Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics , shifted criminological critique toward understanding media as a hegemonic force that reinforces state power and social control (Brown, 2011 ; Carrabine, 2008 ; Cohen, 2005 ; Garland, 2008 ; Hall et al., 2013 /1973, 2013/1973 ). Since that time, moral panic has become a common framework applied to public discourse around a variety of social issues including road rage, child abuse, popular music, sex panics, and drug abuse among others.

Into the 21st century , advances in technology, including increased use of social media, shifted the ways that criminologists approach the study of media effects. Scholar Sheila Brown traced how research in criminology evolved from a focus on “media and crime” to what she calls the “media/crime nexus” that recognizes that “media experience is real experience” (Brown, 2011 , p. 413). In other words, many criminologists began to reject as fallacy what social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson deemed “digital dualism,” or the notion that we have an “online” existence that is separate and distinct from our “off-line” existence. Instead, we exist simultaneously both online and offline, an

augmented reality that exists at the intersection of materiality and information, physicality and digitality, bodies and technology, atoms and bits, the off and the online. It is wrong to say “IRL” [in real life] to mean offline: Facebook is real life. (Jurgenson, 2012 )

The changing media landscape has been of particular interest to cultural criminologists. Michelle Brown recognized the omnipresence of media as significant in terms of methodological preferences and urged a move away from a focus on causality and predictability toward a more fluid approach that embraces the complex, contemporary media-saturated social reality characterized by uncertainty and instability (Brown, 2007 ).

Cultural criminologists have indeed rejected direct, causal relationships in favor of the recognition that social meanings of aggression and violence are constantly in transition, flowing through the media landscape, where “bits of information reverberate and bend back on themselves, creating a fluid porosity of meaning that defines late-modern life, and the nature of crime and media within it.” In other words, there is no linear relationship between crime and its representation. Instead, crime is viewed as inseparable from the culture in which our everyday lives are constantly re-created in loops and spirals that “amplify, distort, and define the experience of crime and criminality itself” (Ferrell, Hayward, & Young, 2015 , pp. 154–155). As an example of this shift in understanding media effects, criminologist Majid Yar proposed that we consider how the transition from being primarily consumers to primarily producers of content may serve as a motivating mechanism for criminal behavior. Here, Yar is suggesting that the proliferation of user-generated content via media technologies such as social media (i.e., the desire “to be seen” and to manage self-presentation) has a criminogenic component worthy of criminological inquiry (Yar, 2012 ). Shifting attention toward the media/crime nexus and away from traditional media effects analyses opens possibilities for a deeper understanding of the ways that media remains an integral part of our everyday lives and inseparable from our understandings of and engagement with crime and violence.

Over the years, from films to comic books to television to video games to social media, concerns over media effects have shifted along with changing technologies. While there seems to be some consensus that exposure to violent media impacts aggression, there is little evidence showing its impact on violent or criminal behavior. Nonetheless, high-profile violent crimes continue to reignite public interest in media effects, particularly with regard to copycat crimes.

At times, academic debate around media effects remains contentious and one’s academic discipline informs the study and interpretation of media effects. Criminologists and sociologists are generally reluctant to attribute violence and criminal behavior directly to exposure to violence media. They are, however, not dismissive of the impact of media on attitudes, social policies, and social control as evidenced by the myriad of studies on moral panics and other research that addresses the relationship between media, social anxieties, gender, race, and class inequalities. Scholars who study media effects are also sensitive to the historical context of the debates and ways that moral concerns shape public policies. The self-regulating codes of the film industry and the comic book industry have led scholars to be wary of hyperbole and policy overreach in response to claims of media effects. Future research will continue to explore ways that changing technologies, including increasing use of social media, will impact our understandings and perceptions of crime as well as criminal behavior.

The Facts on Media Violence

By Vanessa Schipani

Posted on March 8, 2018

In the wake of the Florida school shooting, politicians have raised concern over the influence of violent video games and films on young people, with the president claiming they’re “shaping young people’s thoughts.” Scientists still debate the issue, but the majority of studies show that extensive exposure to media violence is a risk factor for aggressive thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

research on media violence has found that tv violence

The link between media violence and mass shootings is yet more tenuous. Compared with acts of aggression and violence, mass shootings are relatively rare events, which makes conducting conclusive research on them difficult.

President Donald Trump first raised the issue during a meeting on school safety with local and state officials, which took place a week after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The shooter, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, reportedly obsessively played violent video games.

Trump, Feb. 22: We have to look at the Internet because a lot of bad things are happening to young kids and young minds, and their minds are being formed. And we have to do something about maybe what they’re seeing and how they’re seeing it. And also video games. I’m hearing more and more people say the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts. And then you go the further step, and that’s the movies. You see these movies, they’re so violent.

Trump discussed the issue again with members of Congress on Feb. 28 during another meeting on school safety. During that discussion, Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn claimed mothers have told her they’re “very concerned” that “exposure” to entertainment media has “desensitized” children to violence.

Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley also said during the meeting: “[Y]ou see all these films about everybody being blown up. Well, just think of the impact that makes on young people.”

The points Trump and members of Congress raise aren’t unfounded, but the research on the subject is complex. Scientists who study the effect of media violence have taken issue with how the popular press has portrayed their work, arguing that the nuance of their research is often left out.

In a 2015 review of the scientific literature on video game violence, the American Psychological Association elaborates on this point.

APA, 2015: News commentators often turn to violent video game use as a potential causal contributor to acts of mass homicide. The media point to perpetrators’ gaming habits as either a reason they have chosen to commit their crimes or as a method of training. This practice extends at least as far back as the Columbine massacre (1999). … As with most areas of science, the picture presented by this research is more complex than is usually depicted in news coverage and other information prepared for the general public.

Here, we break down the facts — nuance included — on the effect of media violence on young people.

Is Media Violence a Risk Factor for Aggression?

The 2015 report by the APA on video games is a good place to start. After systematically going through the scientific literature, the report’s authors “concluded that violent video game use has an effect on aggression.”

In particular, the authors explain that this effect manifests as an increase in aggressive behaviors, thoughts and feelings and a decrease in helping others, empathy and sensitivity to aggression. Though limited, evidence also suggests that “higher amounts of exposure” to video games is linked to “higher levels of aggression,” the report said.

The report emphasized that “aggression is a complex behavior” caused by multiple factors, each of which increases the likelihood that an individual will be aggressive. “Children who experience multiple risk factors are more likely to engage in aggression,” the report said.

The authors came to their conclusions because researchers have consistently found the effect across three different kinds of studies: cross-sectional studies, longitudinal studies and laboratory experiments. “One method’s limits are offset by another method’s strengths,” the APA report explains, so only together can they be used to infer a causal relationship.

Cross-sectional studies find correlations between different phenomena at one point in time. They’re relatively easy to conduct, but they can’t provide causal evidence because correlations can be spurious . For example, an increase in video game sales might correlate with a decrease in violent crime, but that doesn’t necessarily mean video games prevent violent crime. Other unknown factors might also be at play.

Longitudinal panel studies collect data on the same group over time, sometimes for decades. They’re used to investigate long-term effects, such as whether playing video games as a child might correlate with aggression as an adult. These studies also measure other risk factors for aggression, such as harsh discipline from parents, with the aim of singling out the effect of media violence. For this reason, these studies provide better evidence for causality than cross-sectional studies, but they are more difficult to conduct.

Laboratory experiments manipulate one phenomenon — in this case, exposure to media violence — and keep all others constant. Because of their controlled environment, experiments provide strong evidence for a causal effect. But for the same reason, laboratory studies may not accurately reflect how people act in the real world.

This brings us to why debate still exists among scientists studying media violence. Some researchers have found that the experimental evidence backing the causal relationship between playing video games and aggression might not be as solid as it seems.

Last July, Joseph Hilgard , an assistant professor of psychology at Illinois State University, and others published a study in the journal Psychological Bulletin that found that laboratory experiments on the topic may be subject to publication bias. This means that studies that show the effect may be more likely to be published than those that don’t, skewing the body of evidence.

After Hilgard corrected for this bias, the effect of violent video games on aggressive behavior and emotions did still exist, but it was reduced, perhaps even to near zero. However, the effect on aggressive thoughts remained relatively unaffected by this publication bias. The researchers also found that cross-sectional studies weren’t subject to publication bias. They didn’t examine longitudinal studies, which have shown that youth who play more violent video games are more likely to report aggressive behavior over time.

Hilgard looked at a 2010 literature review by Craig A. Anderson , the director of the Center for the Study of Violence at Iowa State University, and others. Published in Psychological Bulletin, this review influenced the APA’s report.

In response, Anderson took a second look at his review and found that the effect of violent video games on aggression was smaller than he originally thought, but not as small as Hilgard found. For this reason, he argued the effect was still a “societal concern.”

To be clear, Hilgard is arguing that there’s more uncertainty in the field than originally thought, not that video games have no effect on aggression. He’s also not the first to find that research on video games may be suffering from publication bias.

But what about movies and television? Reviews of the literature on these forms of media tend to be less recent, Kenneth A. Dodge , a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, told us by email.

Dodge, also one of the authors of the 2015 APA study, pointed us to one 1994 review of the literature on television published in the journal Communication Research that concluded that television violence also “increases aggressiveness and antisocial behavior.” Dodge told us he’s “confident” the effect this analysis and others found “would hold again today.”

Dodge also pointed us to a 2006 study that reviewed the literature on violent video games, films, television and other media together. “Most contemporary studies start with the premise that children are exposed [to violence] through so many diverse media that they start to group them together,” said Dodge.

Published in JAMA Pediatrics , the review found that exposure to violent media increases the likelihood of aggressive behavior, thoughts and feelings. The review also found media decreases the likelihood of helping behavior. All of these effects were “modest,” the researchers concluded.

Overall, most of the research suggests media violence is a risk factor for aggression, but some experts in the field still question whether there’s enough evidence to conclusively say there’s a link.

Is Violent Media a Risk Factor for Violence?

There’s even less evidence to suggest media violence is a risk factor for criminal violence.

“In psychological research, aggression is usually conceptualized as behavior that is intended to harm another,” while, “[v]iolence can be defined as an extreme form of physical aggression,” the 2015 APA report explains . “Thus, all violence is aggression, but not all aggression is violence.”

The APA report said studies have been conducted on media violence’s relationship with “criminal violence,” but the authors “did not find enough evidence of sufficient utility to evaluate whether” there’s a solid link to violent video game use.

This lack of evidence is due, in part, to the fact that there are ethical limitations to conducting experiments on violence in the laboratory, especially when it comes to children and teens, the report explains. That leaves only evidence from cross-sectional studies and longitudinal studies. So what do those studies say?

One longitudinal study , published in the journal Developmental Psychology in 2003, found that, out of 153 males, those who watched the most violent television as children were more likely 15 years later “to have pushed, grabbed, or shoved their spouses, to have responded to an insult by shoving a person” or to have been “to have been convicted of a crime” during the previous year. Girls who watched the most violent television were also more likely to commit similar acts as young women. These effects persisted after controlling for other risk factors for aggression, such as parental aggression and intellectual ability.

A 2012 cross-sectional study that Anderson, at Iowa State, and others published in the journal Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice did find that the amount of violent video games juvenile delinquents played correlated with how many violent acts they had committed over the past year. The violent acts included gang fighting, hitting a teacher, hitting a parent, hitting other students and attacking another person.

However, a 2008 review of the literature published in the journal Criminal Justice and Behavior concluded that “ the effects of exposure to media violence on criminally violent behavior have not been established.” But the authors clarify: “Saying that the effect has not been established is not the same as saying that the effect does not exist.”

In contrast to the APA report, Anderson and a colleague argue in a 2015 article published in American Behavioral Scientist that “research shows that media violence is a causal risk factor not only for mild forms of aggression but also for more serious forms of aggression, including violent criminal behavior.”

Why did Anderson and his colleagues come to different conclusions than the APA? He told us that the APA “did not include the research literature on TV violence,” and excluded “several important studies on video game effects on violent behavior published since 2013.”

In their 2015 article, Anderson and his colleague clarify that, even if there is a link, it “does not mean that violent media exposure by itself will turn a normal child or adolescent who has few or no other risk factors into a violent criminal or a school shooter.” They add, “Such extreme violence is rare, and tends to occur only when multiple risk factors converge in time, space, and within an individual.”

Multiple experts we spoke with did point to one factor unique to the United States that they argue increases the risk of mass shootings and lethality of violence in general — access to guns.

For example, Anderson told us by email: “There is a pretty strong consensus among violence researchers in psychology and criminology that the main reason that U.S. homicide rates are so much higher than in most Western democracies is our easy access to guns.”

Dodge, at Duke, echoed Anderson’s point.”The single most obvious and probably largest difference between a country like the US that has many mass shootings and other developed countries is the easy access to guns,” he said.

So while scientists disagree about how much evidence is enough to sufficiently support a causal link between media violence and real world violence, Trump and other politicians’ concerns aren’t unfounded.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is also based at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center. Hilgard, now at Illinois State, was a post doctoral fellow at the APPC.

Early Exposure to TV Violence Predicts Aggression in Adulthood

Huesmann, L. R., Moise-Titus, J., Podolski, C., & Eron, L. D. (2003). Longitudinal relations between children’s exposure to TV violence and their aggressive and violent behavior in young adulthood: 1977-1992. Developmental Psychology, 39 , 201-221.

What is this study about?

There is increasing evidence that early exposure to media violence is a contributing factor to the development of aggression. However, much of the past research on media violence has focused on short-term effects and reported significant relations only for boys. This study draws on social-cognitive observational-learning theory, desensitization theory, and social comparison theory to examine the longitudinal relationship between early exposure to TV violence and adult aggressive behavior for both males and females.

This study is a follow-up of the 3-year longitudinal study conducted by Huesmann and his colleagues in 1977. In the original study, which included 557 children from five countries (aged 6-10 years), researchers gathered information on childhood TV-violence viewing, identification with aggressive TV characters, judgments of realism of TV violence, aggressive behavior, and intellectual ability, as well as parents’ socioeconomic status (measured by educational level), aggressiveness, parenting practices and attitudes, and parent’s TV usage (i.e., TV-viewing frequency and TV-violence viewing).

In this follow-up study, researchers interviewed and gathered collateral data (i.e., archival records and interviews of spouses and friends) on 329 participants from the original sample. At the time of the follow-up, the participants ranged in age from 20 to 25 years. Researchers administered measures of adult TV-violence viewing and adult aggressive behavior, and obtained archival data on criminal conviction and moving violation records from state records.

What did the study find?

The results of this study revealed that early childhood exposure to TV violence predicted aggressive behavior for both males and females in adulthood. Additionally, identification with same sex aggressive TV characters, as well as participants’ ratings of perceived realism of TV violence, also predicted adult aggression in both males and females. Furthermore, while a positive relationship was found between early aggression and subsequent TV violence viewing, the effect was not significant. These findings suggest that, while aggressive children may choose to watch more violent TV programming, it is more plausible that early childhood exposure to TV violence stimulates increases in aggression later in adulthood.

Gender differences were also observed in the expression of aggression. Specifically, men were more likely to engage in serious physical aggression and criminality, whereas women were more likely to engage in forms of indirect aggression. Men and women reported similar frequencies of engaging in verbal aggression, general aggression, and aggression toward spouses. For men, the effects were exacerbated by their identification with same sex characters and perceptions of realism in TV violence.

The longitudinal relationships observed in this study held true, even after controlling for the effects of early aggressive behavior in childhood, socioeconomic status, intellectual ability, and various parenting factors. These findings support the hypothesis that the causal effects of media violence exposure found in laboratory settings can be generalized to real life from childhood to adulthood.

How does this relate to the ACT Against Violence program?

Children are increasingly becoming heavy media consumers. Research indicates that much of the media directed at children contains violent content. While media violence exposure may have short-term effects on adults, its negative impact on children is enduring. As this study suggests, early exposure to TV violence places both male and female children at risk for the development of aggressive and violent behavior in adulthood. The ACT program addresses the impact of media violence on the development of young children, and teaches parents strategies for reducing their children’s exposure to media violence.

Other Resources

Parents' Use of Physical Punishment Increases Violent Behavior Among Youth
Elder abuse: How to spot warning signs, get help, and report mistreatment
Intimate partner violence: Know the risks and what you can do to help yourself

Contact the Violence Prevention Office

Aggression and Popular Media: From Violence in Entertainment Media to News Coverage of Violence

First Online: 30 April 2024

Cite this chapter

El-Lim Kim 4 &
Craig A. Anderson 4

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The current chapter presents a summary of the accumulated research findings on aggression and popular media, with a specific focus on fictional violence (e.g., violence in popular media such as television, movies, and video games) and real-world violence (e.g., news coverage of violent crimes and terrorism). Possible consequences of media violence exposure—including increased aggressive affect, cognition, and behaviors—are discussed in terms of the General Aggression Model. Evidence from cross-sectional, experimental, and longitudinal studies is summarized. The chapter concludes with the implication of media portrayal of fictional and real-life violence as a risk factor for human aggression and negative psychological well-being.

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See http://www.craiganderson.org/wp-content/uploads/caa/StatementsonMediaViolence.html

All were children’s games.

Please note that there are positive effects of prosocial media exposure. In fact, our research team was the first to definitively show that nonviolent prosocial video games can increase prosocial behaviors in experimental, cross-sectional, and longitudinal studies (Gentile et al., 2009 ).

However, this effect became nonsignificant when demographic variables were statistically controlled.

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Kim, EL., Anderson, C.A. (2024). Aggression and Popular Media: From Violence in Entertainment Media to News Coverage of Violence. In: Rich, G.J., Kumar, V.K., Farley, F.H. (eds) Handbook of Media Psychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56537-3_11

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Annual Review of Public Health

Volume 27, 2006, review article, the role of media violence in violent behavior.

L. Rowell Huesmann 1 , and Laramie D. Taylor 1
View Affiliations Hide Affiliations Affiliations: 1 Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106-1248; email: [email protected] 2 Communication Department, University of California, Davis, California 95616; email: [email protected]
Vol. 27:393-415 (Volume publication date April 2006) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.publhealth.26.021304.144640
© Annual Reviews

Media violence poses a threat to public health inasmuch as it leads to an increase in real-world violence and aggression. Research shows that fictional television and film violence contribute to both a short-term and a long-term increase in aggression and violence in young viewers. Television news violence also contributes to increased violence, principally in the form of imitative suicides and acts of aggression. Video games are clearly capable of producing an increase in aggression and violence in the short term, although no long-term longitudinal studies capable of demonstrating long-term effects have been conducted. The relationship between media violence and real-world violence and aggression is moderated by the nature of the media content and characteristics of and social influences on the individual exposed to that content. Still, the average overall size of the effect is large enough to place it in the category of known threats to public health.

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Violent media and real-world behavior: Historical data and recent trends

2015 study from Stetson University published in Journal of Communications that explores violence in movies and video games and rates of societal violence over the same period.

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by Devon Maylie, The Journalist's Resource February 18, 2015

This <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org/criminal-justice/violent-media-real-world-behavior-historical-data-recent-trends/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org">The Journalist's Resource</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/cropped-jr-favicon-150x150.png" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

The relationship between violent media and real-world violence has been the subject of extensive debate and considerable academic research , yet the core question is far from answered. Do violent games and movies encourage more violence, less, or is there no effect? Complicating matters is what seems like a simultaneous rise in onscreen mayhem and the number of bloody events in our streets — according to a 2014 report from the FBI, between 2007 and 2013 there were an average of 16.4 active-shooter incidents in the U.S. every year, more than 150% higher than the annual rate between 2000 and 2006.

But as has long been observed, any correlation is not necessarily causation . While Adam Lanza and James Holmes — respectively, the perpetrators of the Newtown and Aurora mass shootings — both played violent video games , so do millions of law-abiding Americans. A 2014 study in Psychology of Popular Media Culture found no evidence of an association between violent crime and video game sales and the release dates of popular violent video games. “Unexpectedly, many of the results were suggestive of a decrease in violent crime in response to violent video games,” write the researchers, based at Villanova and Rutgers. A 2015 study from the University of Toledo showed that playing violent video games could desensitize children and youth to violence, but didn’t establish a definitive connection with real-world behavior, positive or negative.

A 2014 study in Journal of Communication , “Does Media Violence Predict Societal Violence? It Depends on What You Look at and When,” builds on prior research to look closer at media portrayals of violence and rates of violent behavior. The research, by Christopher J. Ferguson of Stetson University, had two parts: The first measured the frequency and graphicness of violence in movies between 1920 and 2005 and compared it to homicide rates, median household income, policing, population density, youth population and GDP over the same period. The second part looked at the correlation between the consumption of violent video games and youth behavior from 1996 to 2011.

The study’s findings include:

Overall, no evidence was found to support the conclusion that media violence and societal violence are meaningfully correlated.
Across the 20th century the frequency of movie violence followed a rough U-pattern: It was common in the 1920s, then declined before rising again in the latter part of the 20th century. This appears to correspond to the period of the Motion Picture Production Code (known as the Hays Code), in force from 1930 to the late 1960s.

Movie violence and homicide rates (C.J. Ferguson)

The frequency of movie violence and murder rates were correlated in the mid-20th century, but not earlier or later in the period studied. “By the latter 20th century … movie violence [was] associated with reduced societal violence in the form of homicides. Further, the correlation between movie and societal violence was reduced when policing or real GDP were controlled.”
The graphicness of movie violence shows an increasing pattern across the 20th century, particularly beginning in the 1950s, but did not correlate with societal violence.
The second part of the study found that for the years 1996 to 2011, the consumption of violent video games was inversely related to youth violence.
Youth violence decreased during the 15-year study period despite high levels of media violence in society. However, the study period is relatively short, the researcher cautioned, and therefore results could be imperfect.

“Results from the two studies suggest that socialization models of media violence may be inadequate to our understanding of the interaction between media and consumer behavior at least in regard to serious violence,” Ferguson concludes. “Adoption of a limited-effects model in which user motivations rather than content drive media experiences may help us understand how media can have influences, yet those influences result in only limited aggregate net impact in society.” Given that effects on individual users may differ widely, Ferguson suggests that policy discussion should be more focused on “more pressing” issues that influence violence in society such as poverty or mental health.

Related research: A 2015 research roundup, “The Contested Field of Violent Video Games,” gives an overview of recent scholarship on video games and societal violence, including ones that support a link and others that refute it. Also of interest is a 2014 research roundup, “Mass Murder, Shooting Sprees and Rampage Violence.”

Keywords: video games, violence, aggression, desensitization, empathy, technology, youth, cognition, guns, crime, entertainment

About The Author

Devon Maylie

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Desensitization to Media Violence: Links With Habitual Media Violence Exposure, Aggressive Cognitions, and Aggressive Behavior

Barbara krahé.

Department of Psychology, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

Ingrid Möller

L. rowell huesmann.

Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan

Lucyna Kirwil

Department of Social Psychology, Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, Poland

Juliane Felber

Anja berger.

This study examined the links between desensitization to violent media stimuli and habitual media violence exposure as a predictor and aggressive cognitions and behavior as outcome variables. Two weeks after completing measures of habitual media violence exposure, trait aggression, trait arousability, and normative beliefs about aggression, undergraduates ( N = 303) saw a violent film clip and a sad or a funny comparison clip. Skin conductance level (SCL) was measured continuously, and ratings of anxious and pleasant arousal were obtained after each clip. Following the clips, participants completed a lexical decision task to measure accessibility of aggressive cognitions and a competitive reaction time task to measure aggressive behavior. Habitual media violence exposure correlated negatively with SCL during violent clips and positively with pleasant arousal, response times for aggressive words, and trait aggression, but it was unrelated to anxious arousal and aggressive responding during the reaction time task. In path analyses controlling for trait aggression, normative beliefs, and trait arousability, habitual media violence exposure predicted faster accessibility of aggressive cognitions, partly mediated by higher pleasant arousal. Unprovoked aggression during the reaction time task was predicted by lower anxious arousal. Neither habitual media violence usage nor anxious or pleasant arousal predicted provoked aggression during the laboratory task, and SCL was unrelated to aggressive cognitions and behavior. No relations were found between habitual media violence viewing and arousal in response to the sad and funny film clips, and arousal in response to the sad and funny clips did not predict aggressive cognitions or aggressive behavior on the laboratory task. This suggests that the observed desensitization effects are specific to violent content.

The hypothesis that media violence increases aggressive behavior has been widely studied in experimental research looking at the short-term effects of exposure to violent media stimuli, as well as in cross-sectional and longitudinal studies relating habitual media violence exposure to individual differences in the readiness to show aggressive behavior. Although there is disagreement among some researchers as to whether or not the evidence currently available supports the view that media violence exposure is a risk factor for aggression ( Huesmann & Taylor, 2003 ), most meta-analyses and reviews have reported substantial effect sizes across different media, methodologies, and outcome variables, suggesting that exposure to violent media contents increases the likelihood of aggressive behavior in the short term as well as over time (e.g., Anderson et al., 2003 ; Bushman & Huesmann, 2006 ; Huesmann, 1982 ; Huesmann & Kirwil, 2007 ; Murray, 2008 ; Paik & Comstock, 1994 ). Other authors have questioned both the strength of the evidence and its implications (e.g., Ferguson, 2007 ; Savage & Yancey, 2008 ). Ferguson and Kilburn (2009 , 2010 ) concluded from their meta-analysis that there was no support for the claim that media violence increases aggressive behavior. However, they acknowledged that experimental studies using proxy measures of aggression did produce substantive effect sizes and were relatively unaffected by publication bias, and their conclusions have been vigorously disputed by others ( Anderson et al., 2010 ; Bushman, Rothstein, & Anderson, 2010 ; Huesmann, 2010 ).

Beyond studying the strength of the link between media violence usage and aggression, researchers have worked toward identifying the underlying processes that mediate between violent media stimuli as input variables and aggressive behavior as an outcome. Whereas priming, mimicry, and excitation transfer are thought to be important mechanisms for the short-term effects of media violence on aggression, observational learning and desensitization have been hypothesized as key mechanisms for long-term effects ( Bandura, 1973 ; Berkowitz, 1965 ; Huesmann, 1982 , 1988 ; Huesmann & Kirwil, 2007 ; Huesmann, Moise, Podolski, & Eron, 2003 ). Observational learning refers to the acquisition of cognitive structures that promote specific behaviors from observing others perform similar behaviors. Watching media characters behave in a violent fashion can instigate a process of observational learning in which a new cognitive and behavioral repertoire promoting violence is acquired. Desensitization , on the other hand, is a process involving changes in emotional responsiveness. In general terms, desensitization refers to the gradual reduction in responsiveness to an arousal-eliciting stimulus as a function of repeated exposure. In the context of media violence, desensitization more specifically describes a process “by which initial arousal responses to violent stimuli are reduced, thereby changing an individual’s ‘present internal state’” ( Carnagey, Anderson, & Bushman, 2007 , p. 491). In particular, desensitization to violent media stimuli is thought to reduce anxious arousal. Fear is a spontaneous and probably innate response of humans in reaction to violence. As with other emotional responses, repeated exposure to media violence can decrease negative affect, because violent stimuli lose their capacity to elicit strong emotions the more often the stimulus is presented ( Anderson & Dill, 2000 ).

Several studies have shown that in the long run, habitual exposure to media violence may reduce anxious arousal in response to depictions of violence. Research has found that the more time individuals spent watching violent media depictions, the less emotionally responsive they became to violent stimuli (e.g., Averill, Malstrom, Koriat, & Lazarus, 1972 ) and the less sympathy they showed for victims of violence in the real world (e.g., Mullin & Linz, 1995 ). Bartholow, Bushman, and Sestir (2006) used event-related brain potential data (ERPs) to compare responses by violent and nonviolent video game users to violent stimuli and relate them to subsequent aggressive responses in a laboratory task. Bartholow et al. found that the more violent games participants played habitually, the less brain activity they showed in response to violent pictures and the more aggressively they behaved in the subsequent task. In a series of studies with children age 5 to 12, Funk and colleagues demonstrated that habitual usage of violent video games was associated with reduced empathy with others in need of help ( Funk, Baldacci, Pasold, & Baumgardner, 2004 ; Funk, Buchman, Jenks, & Bechtoldt, 2003 ).

Evidence is less clear with regard to short-term desensitization effects in experimental settings. In one recent study, Carnagey et al. (2007) showed that participants’ physiological arousal to depictions of real-life violence was reduced after participants had played a violent video game compared to a control group that had played a nonviolent game. In contrast, Funk et al. (2003) found no evidence of short-term desensitization (indicated by reduced empathy with others in need of help) in the children in their study who played a violent video game as compared with those who played a nonviolent game. Ballard, Hamby, Panee, and Nivens (2006) found some evidence of physiological desensitization over a 3-week game playing period but failed to find differential desensitization as a function of playing a violent versus nonviolent game. Finally, Arriaga, Esteves, Carneiro, and Monteiro (2006) failed to find a decrease in physiological arousal from the beginning to the end of a 4-min playing period regardless of whether participants played a violent or a nonviolent game.

Past research has varied with regard to the critical measure of desensitization. Some studies have used self-reported affect (e.g., Fanti, Vanman, Henrich, & Avraamides, 2009 ), while others have used different indicators of physiological arousal, such as heart rate, blood pressure, skin conductance, or measured brain activity (e.g., Bartholow et al., 2006 ; Carnagey et al., 2007 ). Few studies have concurrently examined physiological and subjective indices of arousal (e.g., Ballard et al., 2006 ), and yet fewer have included subjective reports of both negative (anxiety, anger) and positive (enjoyment) emotional responses (for an exception, see Kirwil, 2008 ). This diversity in operationalizing arousal may be one of the reasons for the lack of consistency in research on short-term desensitization.

The vast majority of studies have looked at desensitization in terms of reduced negative arousal in response to media violence. Another pertinent effect of habitual or repeated exposure to media violence may be increased positive arousal or enjoyment. The role of positive arousal to violent media is less than clear. In line with Zillmann’s (1996) model of suspense enjoyment based on excitation transfer principles, a positive association was found between experienced negative affect and enjoyment of violent media in a meta-analysis by Hoffner and Levine (2005) . However, this pattern held only for self-reported negative affect and enjoyment and failed to emerge for the link between physiological arousal and enjoyment.

An alternative perspective on the relationship between anxious and pleasant arousal may be derived from the general aggression model extended by Carnagey et al. (2007) , to include desensitization. They argued that because repeated exposure to media violence reduces the anxiety reaction to violence, new presentations of violence “instigate different cognitive and affective reactions than would have occurred in the absence of desensitization” (p. 491). One such affective reaction may be a positive response to violence that would otherwise have been inhibited by anxious arousal. Huesmann and Kirwil (2007) have called this process sensitization . They argued that, for some individuals, watching violence is enjoyable, and, whereas it may provoke anger, it does not produce anxious arousal. On the contrary, the more such individuals watch violence, the more they like watching it. They are experiencing a “sensitization” of positive feelings. Because finding violence pleasant is incompatible with experiencing anxious arousal, increased pleasant arousal to depictions of violence in individuals with a high exposure to media violence would constitute indirect evidence of desensitization of “negative feelings” about violence. On the basis of this line of reasoning, we propose that anxious arousal by violent media stimuli is negatively related to pleasant arousal and that habitual exposure to media violence should both decrease negative emotional reactions and increase positive emotional reactions to violence, though the increase in positive emotions may occur for only a subset of individuals. For example, in a recent study of young adults in Poland, Kirwil (2008) found that proactively aggressive individuals tended to respond to violent media stimuli with a reduction in anxious arousal, whereas reactively aggressive individuals tended to respond with an increase in enjoyment.

A further key question refers to the content specificity of desensitization in response to violent media stimuli. Does desensitization to other arousing stimuli also predict increased aggression, or is the link dependent on violent content? Anderson and Bushman (2001) pointed out that although exciting nonviolent video games can increase arousal, “only violent games should directly prime aggressive thoughts and stimulate the long-term development of aggressive knowledge structures” (p. 356). Experimental studies comparing the effects of violent and nonviolent video games matched for difficulty, enjoyment, arousal quality, and level of frustration have provided empirical support for this line of reasoning (e.g., Anderson et al., 2004 ; Bartholow, Sestir, & Davis, 2005 ). Carnagey et al. (2007) found that although there were no differences in heart rate immediately after playing a violent versus a nonviolent game for 20 min, participants in the violent but not in the nonviolent game condition subsequently showed reduced arousal when witnessing a real-life incident of violence. This finding indicates that desensitization to real-life violence is contingent upon the violent content of the media stimulus. However, this explanation focuses on the cognitive effects of violent media input, and a different mechanism is required to explain how changes in emotional reactivity might affect aggression. Huesmann and colleagues ( Huesmann, 1997 , p. 81; Huesmann, 2007 ; Huesmann & Kirwil, 2007 ; Huesmann et al., 2003 ) proposed that a person’s emotional reaction to the anticipation of aggression and violence plays a role in inhibiting or promoting aggressive responding. When scripts for behaving aggressively are activated by some situation, they may be inhibited if the anxious arousal stimulated by that activation is greater than the pleasant arousal. Consequently, people whose negative emotional reactions to violence have been desensitized (or who by disposition have lower reactions) may experience more positive emotions when anticipating aggression and should be more likely to engage in aggression. According to this theoretical position, people who react less negatively to violent media scenes and experience more positive reactions to such scenes should be more aggression prone. The key mechanism is the person’s emotional reaction to violent scenes, not the person’s reaction to other kinds of arousing scenes. Relating emotional reactions to scenes of violence to aggression, Moise-Titus (1999) found that people who showed lower anxious reactions to violent scenes scored higher on trait aggression, had watched more media violence, and subsequently behaved more aggressively on a laboratory task. However, she examined only reactions to violent films and did not compare them with reactions to other types of arousing scenes.

Regarding the link between aggression and skin conductance level (SCL) as a quantitative measure of arousal, empirical evidence is mixed, varying for measures of electrodermal activity, age, and the psychological meaning assigned to the stimuli ( Fowles, 2000 ; Fowles, Kochanska, & Murray, 2000 ; Lorber, 2004 ; Patrick & Verona, 2007 ). There is some indication that adults low on resting SCL and in SCL responses to negative stimuli are more prone to showing hostility and aggression. Huesmann and Kirwil (2007) reviewed evidence that individuals displaying low physiological arousal at baseline level were more likely to show aggressive behavior over a subsequent period of observation. Longitudinal studies showed that boys who had lower heart rate and SCLs at age 15 were significantly more likely to commit violent offenses in the following years ( Scarpa & Raine, 2007 ). However, to complicate matters, studies have shown different links between SCL and proactive and reactive aggression, respectively. For example, Hubbard et al. (2002 , 2004 ) found low SCL to be associated with proactive aggression in children, whereas higher levels of SC were related to reactive aggression.

Each of these studies linked individual differences in arousal to relatively stable aggressive dispositions. More pertinent to the present study are studies linking physiological activation to laboratory-induced aggression. In reviewing this research, relying mostly on heart rate as a measure of arousal, Patrick and Verona (2007) concluded that these studies have produced mixed results and called for more research using multiple measures of activation, including SCL. The potential relation of SCL to aggressive cognitions is even less clear. Past research provides at best indirect evidence concerning this issue. Studies have demonstrated a link between low SCL and shorter response latencies in a word association task ( Jones, 1960 ) or a visual discrimination task ( Vossel, 1988 ), but neither study addressed responses to aggression-related stimuli. Against this limited body of research, the present study examined whether differences in baseline SCL and SCL responses during the violent clips would be associated with differences in aggressive cognitions.

Few studies are available that have addressed desensitization to arousing stimuli differing in affective quality. Fanti et al. (2009) showed participants a series of violent and funny film scenes and asked them to indicate how much they enjoyed them. For the violent scenes, there was a curvilinear pattern of liking. An initial decline in enjoyment of the violent scenes was followed by an increase during subsequent scenes, and enjoyment was greater at the end than at the beginning of the series. In contrast, a gradual decline in enjoyment was found for the funny scenes. This finding suggests that sensitization (defined here in terms of an increase in positive affect to depictions of violence that can be assumed to correlate with a decrease in negative affect [desensitization]) was specific to violent content. Unfortunately, Fanti et al. did not include a measure of habitual usage of media violence. Bartholow et al. (2006) compared ERPs to violent pictures with nonviolent but negatively arousing images (e.g., images of facial disfigurements). They found that greater preference and past use of violent games predicted decreased ERPs to the violent pictures but not to the unpleasant comparison pictures and that differences in responses to the nonviolent pictures, unlike differences in response to violent images, were unrelated to subsequent aggressive behavior. In combination, the two studies suggest (a) that repeated media exposure desensitizes emotional reactions to violence only if the exposure is to scenes of violence and (b) that it is only decreased emotional reactions to violence that are linked to increases in aggressive cognitions and behavior.

The Current Study

The current study was designed to add to the existing body of evidence on the role of desensitization in the media violence– aggression link in four ways: (a) by looking at altered emotional reactions to a violent film clip as an outcome variable of long-term, habitual media violence exposure; (b) by looking at desensitization to violence both in terms of a decrease in anxious arousal and of an increase in pleasant arousal; (c) by looking at altered emotional reactions to violent films as a situational predictor of aggressive cognitions and behavior; and (d) by comparing responses to violent media stimuli with responses to sad and funny stimuli to address the issue of the content specificity of the aggression-promoting effects of desensitization.

The study was designed to test our hypotheses about how anxious and pleasant emotional responses to arousing scenes of violence (in contrast to other arousing scenes) relate both to habitual media violence exposure and to proactive and reactive immediate aggression. As described above, existing evidence suggests that those who watch or play violent media should become desensitized to the negative emotions violence stimulates and should experience both less anxious arousal and more pleasant arousal when viewing or thinking about violence. In turn, as Huesmann and colleagues have argued ( Huesmann & Kirwil, 2007 ; Huesmann et al., 2003 ), the reduced anxious and increased pleasant arousal that accompanies thinking about violence should cause more aggressive thoughts to be stimulated by the violent scene and should allow more aggressive scripts—scripts that would normally be inhibited by the anxious arousal—to be used proactively in social problem solving. However, it is unlikely that the more reactive type of angry emotional aggression in response to provocation would be made any more likely by such changes in emotional arousal to scenes of violence. The present study included measures of both proactive and reactive aggression to test this line of reasoning.

This thinking leads us to four specific hypotheses:

The more media violence exposure individuals have had in the past, the less increase in physiological arousal they will show in response to a violent film clip, both compared to arousal at baseline and compared to other arousing media stimuli (sad and funny clips).
The more media violence exposure individuals have had in the past, the less anxious and, correspondingly, the more pleasant arousal will they report in response to a violent film clip. No significant correlations are expected between habitual media violence exposure and anxious and pleasant arousal in response to sad or funny clips, because the desensitization that prior exposure produced would be specific to violent content.
The lower the anxious arousal and the higher the pleasant arousal of individuals in response to a violent film clip, the more rapid will be the accessibility of aggressive cognitions, as evidenced in shorter response latencies in recognizing aggression-related words, and the greater will be the individuals’ immediate proactive unprovoked aggression. The effects will occur independently of the effects of habitual media violence exposure, trait aggression, and aggressive beliefs on the aggression measures and independent of the effects of trait arousability on the arousal measures. The arousal response to violent film clips is not assumed to be related to immediate reactive provoked aggression.
Finally, the relations between emotional arousal to film clips and subsequent aggressive cognitions and behavior are hypothesized to be dependent on the violent content of the arousing stimulus. That is, lower anxious arousal and greater pleasant arousal to the violent film clip but not to the sad or funny clips should be linked to increased accessibility of aggressive cognitions and higher levels of proactive aggressive behavior.

To examine these predictions, we conducted a study in which participants first completed an online questionnaire about their habitual media violence exposure. In addition, trait aggression, trait arousability, and normative beliefs about aggression were measured at this stage as alternative predictors of arousal, aggressive cognitions, and aggressive behavior to enable us to identify the unique contribution of media violence exposure. Two weeks later the participants came into the laboratory and were exposed to two different emotionally arousing films: a violent clip and a sad or a funny comparison clip. They answered a brief questionnaire after each clip assessing a variety of variables including their emotional arousal during the film clip. SCL was recorded constantly before and during the films as a measure of physiological arousal. Following the film clips, participants completed a lexical decision task as a measure of the cognitive accessibility of aggressive thoughts and a competitive reaction time task as a measure of aggressive behavior.

Participants

Students enrolled in a broad range of courses at the University of Potsdam, Germany, were invited by university intranet and flyers to participate in a two-part study on emotional responses to films, the first part of which was to be completed as an online survey. They were informed that following the first part they would be invited to the lab for an experimental session in which they would be shown different film clips. Students were asked to respond by e-mail to express their willingness to participate, and those who did so were sent the link to the online questionnaire, also via e-mail. Participants were offered 15 Euros or, alternatively, 3 hours of course credit for participation in both parts. A total of 625 undergraduate students, 413 men and 212 women, with a mean age of 23.7 years ( SD = 3.09) participated in this initial online survey.

At the end of the online questionnaire, participants received detailed information about the second part of the study and were asked to sign up for a lab session in which they would view some film clips, be recorded physiologically, play a game, and answer more questions. In compliance with the requirements of the Ethics Committee of the University of Potsdam, which formally approved the study, participants were then told about the violent nature of some of the film clips and possible viewer reactions to them as well as about the recording of physiological arousal. Once they had made an appointment for the lab session, participants received a confirmation e-mail instructing them to refrain from drinking coffee or other stimulating drinks for at least two hours prior to the scheduled appointment, as this would interfere with the SCL recording. A total of 341 of the 625 undergraduate students who had completed the online survey participated in the second part of the study; of these, 38 had to be excluded due to unusable SCL data. The final sample consisted of 303 participants (215 men and 88 women) for whom complete data were available from both data points. The mean age of this sample was 23.75 years ( SD = 2.76). On average, lab sessions took place 2 weeks after the return of the online questionnaire.

Measures: Online Questionnaire

Habitual media violence exposure.

Participants were provided with genre lists for movies and electronic games. For each item on the two lists, they were asked to indicate how frequently they used the respective genre on a 5-point scale ranging from 1 ( never ) to 5 ( very often ). Frequency ratings are commonly used in studies operationalizing media violence exposure through providing broad media categories or genre lists (e.g., Potts, Dedmon, & Halford, 1996 ; Slater, Henry, Swaim, & Anderson, 2003 ).

For movies, 10 genres were provided: (a) action, (b) drama, (c) horror/slasher, (d) comedies, (e) military and war, (f) crime thrillers, (g) romantic fiction, (h) martial arts, (i) science fiction, and (j) western. For electronic games, 15 genres were presented: (a) beat-em ups, (b) shoot-em ups, (c) first-person shooters, (d) third-person shooters, (e) tactical shooters, (f) survival horror games, (g) genre mix, (h) classic adventure, (i) action adventure, (j) role-playing games, (k) general simulations, (l) military simulations, (m) sports games, (n) construction strategy, and (o) military strategy. Each game category was illustrated by a specific example prominent at the time of the study.

A sample of 21 undergraduate students (5 women and 16 men, mean age = 23.8 years, SD = 3.12) who identified themselves as regular media users rated the genres in terms of violent content. They were asked to rate the level of violence typically characteristic of each genre, using a 5-point scale from 1 ( nonviolent ) to 5 ( very violent ). Interrater agreement as indicated by Kendall’s W was high ( W = .86, p < .001). On that basis, a mean violence score was computed across raters for each genre.

To arrive at a measure of media violence exposure, we selected those genres that had received violence ratings of higher than 2 on the 5-point scale from 1 ( nonviolent ) to 5 ( very violent ) from the sample of independent raters for the media violence exposure index. This was true for nine out of the 10 movie genres (all except romantic fiction; violence ratings ranged from 2.43 for drama to 4.81 for military and war films) and 12 of the 15 video game genres (all except general simulations, sports games, and construction strategy games; range from 2.05 for classic adventure to 4.95 for first-person shooters). Participants’ frequency ratings for each of the selected genres were multiplied by the average violence rating of that genre obtained from the independent raters. The resulting product scores per genre were then averaged across the 21 genres. 1

Trait arousability

This construct referred to a person’s susceptibility to strong emotional responsiveness in terms of the general tendency to experience strong emotions and the ease of getting into strong positive and negative emotional states. It was measured by a 21-item scale composed of 11 items from Mehrabian’s (1995) Trait Arousability Scale (example item: “I get happy or sad easily”) and 10 items from the Affect Intensity Scale by Geuens and de Pelsmacker (2002; example item: “My happy moods are so strong that I feel like I’m in heaven”). Responses were made on a 7-point scale ranging from 1 ( not at all true ) to 7 ( exactly true ). An overall arousability score was computed for each participant by averaging responses across the 21 items. The scale reliability data for the scales of the online questionnaire are presented in Table 1 .

Reliabilities, Descriptive Statistics, and Gender Differences for the Dispositional Measures in the Online Survey (Time 1 Sample, N 625)

Measure	Items	α	Range			Men	Women		Final sample ( = 303)
Media violence exposure	21	.85	2.05–24.75	7.53	1.86	8.06	6.49	119.60	6.75 (1.62)
Trait aggression	33	.89	1–5	2.08	0.43	2.09	2.00	6.24	2.06 (0.44)
Trait arousability	21	.84	1–7	4.57	0.76	4.32	5.04	152.02	4.57 (0.73)
Aggressive norms	11	.84	1–5	1.78	0.60	1.83	1.69	6.42	1.76 (0.57)

Note . Values for final sample are M (SD ).

Trait aggression

The dispositional tendency toward aggression was measured by a German version of the Aggression Questionnaire by Buss and Perry (1992 ; Krahé & Möller, 2010 ). The original Aggression Questionnaire comprises aggressive behavior (physical aggression, e.g., “I may hit someone if he or she provokes me”; verbal aggression, e.g., “I can’t help getting into arguments when people disagree with me”), anger (e.g., “I have trouble controlling my temper”), and hostility (e.g., “I know that ‘friends’ talk about me behind my back”) as facets of dispositional aggressiveness and has a total of 29 items. Four new items were added to measure relationally aggressive behavior (e.g., “I have sometimes spread rumors about someone who had treated me badly”), bringing the total number of items on this measure to 33. Responses were made on a 5-point scale ranging from 1 ( not at all true ) to 5 ( exactly true ). A total aggression score was computed for each participant by averaging responses across the 33 items.

Aggressive normative beliefs

Normative acceptance of aggression was measured with a vignette describing a provocation scenario based on Krahé and Möller (2004) . The scenario described a confrontation where the protagonist was criticized unfairly by a colleague in front of others and then finds himself/herself alone with that colleague later in the day. The protagonist was described as male or female to match the participants’ gender. A total of 11 aggressive responses by the protagonist toward the colleague were presented as potential actions in that situation (e.g., “to scream at him”, “to insult him”). Participants were asked to indicate, on a 5-point scale, ranging from 1 ( not at all ok ) to 5 ( very much ok ), how acceptable they would find the response in that situation. Ratings were averaged across the 11 items to create an overall index of normative acceptance of aggression. Huesmann and Guerra (1997) have previously found that norms of this type are predictive of aggressive behavior and related to observation of violence.

Order variation

To control for order effects, we created different versions of the questionnaire in which each dispositional measure appeared once in every possible position. The media violence exposure measure was always presented first because it was most closely related to the theme of the study (i.e., a study on emotional reactions to films), as advertised to the participants.

Measures: Laboratory Session

Violent film clips.

Two violent film clips were used in the laboratory part of the study. 2 The first was taken from the film Casino ( Scorsese, 1995 ) and lasted a total of 2:19 min. Within the clip, two critical violent scenes were selected, lasting 59 and 32 s, respectively. The second clip was taken from the film Reservoir Dogs ( Tarantino, 1992 ) with a total length of 4.41 min and two critical scenes of 60 s each. The clips were selected on the basis of a pilot study with 87 undergraduate students that showed them to elicit strong negative affect, in particular anxiety. They had also been used in a previous study by Moise-Titus (1999) and were found to elicit high levels of anxiety.

Based on the results of the pilot study, two clips were selected to elicit sad mood. One was taken from the film The Champ ( Zeffirelli, 1979 ) and lasted 4:19 min. The first critical sad scene lasted 106 s, and the second sad scene lasted 104 s. The second clip was selected from the film Stepmom ( Columbus, 1998 ) and lasted 4:12 min. The two critical scenes lasted 93 s and 92 s, respectively.

Funny clips

The two funny clips were also selected on the basis of the pilot study. Selection criteria were that they contained an action element (excluding purely verbal humor) and that there was no aggression (excluding slapstick scenes, e.g., cream cakes being thrown into a person’s face). The first clip was taken from Monty Python’s Life of Brian ( Jones, 1979 ) and had a total length of 4:07 min. The two critical scenes lasted 136 s and 79 s, respectively. The second funny clip was taken from another Monty Python sketch, Philosophers’ World Cup ( Cleese, 1972 ; http://www.metacafe.com/watch/yt-92vV3QGagck/monty_python_philosophers_world_cup/ ) and had a total length of 3:50 min and two critical scenes of 98 s and 78 s, respectively. Participants in the pilot study were asked if they had seen the clips in question; percentages ranged below 20% across the three types of film. On that basis, it was concluded that familiarity with the selected clips was low in the target sample.

Physiological arousal

SCL was recorded as a measure of physiological arousal. This measure has been widely used in research of desensitization and was described by Ravaja (2004) as an excellent operationalization of arousal in the context of media research. The present study used PAR-PORT, a portable device that records SCL data at a rate of 10 measures per second ( www.par-berlin.com ). This sampling rate is common in studies in which SCL is used as an outcome measure in media research (e.g., Lang, Zhou, Schwartz, Bolls, & Potter, 2000 ). Prior to the film presentation, an 80-s baseline measure was taken during a resting period. 3 SCL was then recorded continuously throughout the presentation of the film clips.

Self-reported affective responses and perceptions of film clips

Immediately after each film clip ended, participants were asked to rate how they had felt while watching the clip by indicating how pleasant they had found the clip and how much anxiety they had felt while watching it. These two critical items were embedded within three manipulation check items and four further filler items, and responses were made on a 7-point scale ranging from 0 ( not at all ) to 6 ( very much ). For the manipulation check items, participants were asked to rate how violent, sad, and funny they had found the film clip. Ratings were made on a 7-point scale ranging from 0 ( not at all ) to 6 ( very much ).

Accessibility of aggressive thoughts

To measure response latencies for aggressive words as an index of cognitive availability, we asked participants to work on a lexical decision task and measured their reaction time to complete it. They were presented with a total of 160 six-letter strings and had to indicate for each string whether or not it represented a meaningful German word. The stimulus material was drawn from a pilot study with linguistics students and consisted of 40 aggressive words (e.g., cannon, weapon, knives ), 40 nonaggressive words (e.g., flower, summer, meadow ), and 80 nonwords (e.g., rahmin, strese, faltar ) presented in random order. The nonaggressive words and the nonwords served as covariates to control for overall differences in response latencies regardless of content. The reaction times in the lexical decision task were converted into log scores and were then aggregated into mean scores for aggressive words, nonaggressive words, and nonwords, respectively.

Aggressive behavior

The noise blast paradigm, a standard competitive reaction time task often employed in media violence research, was used as a measure of aggressive behavior ( Anderson & Bushman, 1997 ; Ferguson, Rueda, Cruz, Ferguson, & Fritz, 2008 ). Participants were instructed that they would compete against another person in a series of 25 trials in how fast they could press a button in response to a visual signal and that the faster of the two would win the trial. They were told that the winner could send an aversive noise stimulus to the other person and that prior to each trial both participants would set the intensity of the noise level they were going to send to the other person in case they won. In fact, there was no other player involved, and the winning and losing trials were computer generated. Prior to the first round, participants received a sample noise blast and did a dummy run to familiarize themselves with the procedure. Noise levels ranged from 60 dB (Level 1) to 105 dB (Level 10, about the same volume as a smoke or fire alarm). A nonaggressive no-noise option (Level 0) was also provided. They were told that prior to each trial they would see the alleged opponent’s chosen noise level for the preceding trial and that the other person would see theirs.

The noise level set for the first trial (before participants learned about the noise level set by the alleged opponent) yielded a measure of proactive, unprovoked aggression ( Giancola & Parrott, 2008 ). The mean noise level set for the remaining 24 trials served as a measure of reactive, provoked aggression , because participants were aware of the noise levels their alleged opponent had set before selecting theirs. The noise level set for the first trial is considered the purer measure of individual differences in aggression, because it is not confounded by the pattern of provocations the participant receives on subsequent trials.

Upon arrival at the lab, participants were seated in front of a computer and connected to the PAR-PORT device for measuring SCL. After the 80-s baseline was recorded, they were shown the first film clip. Participants were randomly allocated to one of two orders (violent film first, comparison film second and vice versa), one of two comparison conditions (sad vs. funny), and one of the two film clips per condition, yielding a total of 16 different combinations. Following the film clip, they rated their pleasant and anxious arousal during the clip and also made ratings of how violent, sad, and funny they found the clip. These measures were completed in a paper-and-pencil format, and the SCL recoding was halted during this phase. Then the SCL recording was resumed and, after another 80-s baseline recording period, the second film clip was shown. The procedure was exactly the same for the second film clip, with the same measurements of self-reported arousal and evaluation of the film clip taken immediately afterward. After the second clip ratings were completed, the participants received a standardized set of verbal instructions on screen for the word completion task and for the noise blast task (see Bartholow et al., 2006 ). These two tasks were presented in counterbalanced order. The experimenter was present during the whole session but separated from the participant by a screen. At the end of the session, participants were shown an entertaining film about frolicking monkeys designed to dissipate any remaining negative arousal and were fully debriefed before receiving their monetary reward or course credit.

Dispositional Measures (Time 1)

The means and standard deviations for the dispositional measures from the online survey (i.e., media violence exposure, trait aggression, trait arousability, and normative beliefs) along with information about internal consistency are presented in Table 1 . All measures were found to have good reliability. It should be noted that conceptually, the media violence exposure measure is not required to have high internal consistency because the different genres and media can be used independently of one another, and the index therefore presents a cumulative measure of exposure. Nonetheless, the alpha of .85 reported in Table 1 is substantial, suggesting that preference for violent media contents shows a consistent pattern across genres.

One-way analyses of variance revealed significant gender differences on all of the variables in the study. As shown in Table 1 , men scored higher on media violence exposure, acceptance of aggressive norms, and aggressive behavior, and women scored higher on trait arousability. A comparison of participants who took part in both parts of the study with those who dropped out after Time 1 showed no significant differences between the two groups on any of the Time 1 measures, multivariate F (4, 567) = 1.23, p = .30, all univariate effects p > .10 (see Table 1 for means of the final sample). Therefore, there is no indication that the final sample of participants who took part in the full study was different from the initial, larger sample on any of the variables of interest.

Laboratory Measures of Aggression and Self-Reported Emotional Arousal (Time 2)

The means, reliabilities, and gender differences for the self-report arousal measures and aggression variables are shown in Table 2 . Again, the measures had high internal consistencies, and again there were significant gender differences. Men scored significantly higher on pleasant arousal while watching the clips, whereas women scored significantly higher on anxious arousal. Men also scored higher on unprovoked aggression in the competitive reaction time task.

Means and Gender Differences for Self-Reports of Arousal and Situational Aggression Measures During Laboratory Task (N = 303)

Measure	Items	α	Range			Men	Women
Pleasant arousal: All films	3		0–6	2.76	1.04	2.93	2.41	15.71
Anxious arousal: All films	3		0–6	1.13	1.19	0.98	1.58	14.75
Log response times aggressive words	40	.92	6.21–7.60	6.60	0.20	6.60	6.60	0.01
Unprovoked aggression	1		0–10	2.19	1.63	2.29	1.82	4.95
Provoked aggression	24	.96	0–10	3.63	2.02	3.62	3.50	0.19

Manipulation Checks for Film Clips

The manipulation checks for the three types of film clips are presented in Table 3 . As expected, the two violent film clips were perceived as highly violent, and violence ratings were significantly higher than those for the sad and funny comparison films. The two sad films produced significantly higher sadness ratings than the violent and funny films did, and the two funny films produced significantly higher funniness ratings than the violent and the sad films did. Thus, the clips were successful at representing the categories of violent, sad, and funny films. There were no significant differences within each film condition or between different orders of presentation. Therefore, the data were collapsed across these two variables for further analysis.

Manipulation Checks for Violent, Sad, and Funny Films in Laboratory Study

	Violent clips		Sad clips		Funny clips
Affective response
Was violent	5.30 (1.07)	5.00 (1.00)	0.54 (0.94)	0.02 (0.15)	1.06 (1.12)	0.02 (0.16)
Was sad	2.95 (1.84)	1.81 (1.72)	4.11 (1.46)	4.50 (1.30)	0.28 (0.97)	0.04 (0.20)
Was funny	0.27 (0.82)	0.94 (1.30)	0.22 (0.61)	0.50 (0.24)	4.82 (1.22)	4.74 (1.22)

Note . Values are M (SD ). Scale range was 0–6. Violence ratings were significantly higher in the two violent clips than in the sad and funny clips, sadness ratings were significantly higher in the two sad clips than in the violent and funny clips, and funniness ratings were significantly higher in the two funny clips than in the sad and violent clips. All ps < .000.

Bivariate Correlations Between Violence Exposure, Aggressive Norms, Arousal, and Aggression

The correlations between the dispositional trait measures from the online survey, the self-reported measures of arousal in response to the violent film clip, and the postfilm aggression measures are presented in Table 4 . Because men and women differed on several of the measures, the correlations are presented separately for men and for women. For both genders, habitual media violence exposure correlated positively with trait aggression, with pleasant arousal to the violent clip, and with more rapid recognition of aggressive words in the lexical decisions task. Trait aggression was linked to beliefs accepting aggression, and trait arousability showed a positive correlation with anxious arousal elicited by the violent clip. In addition, some gender-specific correlations were found. For women, media violence exposure correlated with beliefs accepting aggression and trait aggression correlated with pleasant arousal. For men, trait arousability was negatively correlated with pleasant arousal by the violent clip. Habitual media violence exposure was unrelated to both unprovoked and provoked aggression on the competitive reaction time task for both genders.

Correlations Between Media Violence Exposure, Trait Aggression, Trait Arousability, Aggressive Norms, Self-Reported Arousal From Violent Clip, and Situational Aggression (N = 303)

Variable	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
1. Media violence exposure	—	.18	.04	.06	.13	−.03	−.21	.09	.11
2. Trait aggression	.18	—	.21	49	.00	.05	−.15	.18	.12
3. Trait arousability	−.18	.09	—	.11	−.21	.15	.02	−.03	.11
4. Aggressive norms	.26	.38	.04	—	.01	.10	−.08	.18	.26
5. Pleasant arousal from violent clip	.30	.27	.06	.08	—	−.43	.17	.07	.03
6. Anxious arousal from violent clip	−.19	−.03	.30	−.06	−.39	—	.12	−.11	−.01
7. Log RT aggressive words	−.19	−.14	.11	−.18	−.11	−.08	—	−.03	−.08
8. Unprovoked aggression	−.03	.17	.09	.01	−.08	−.14	−.09	—	.59
9. Provoked aggression	−.07	.10	.05	−.11	.12	.03	−.09	.54	—

Note . Men ( N = 215) are above and women ( N = 88) are below the diagonal. RT = reaction time.

Aggregate Scores of Physiological Arousal

After they had been cleaned for outliers and adjusted for skewness through square root transformations, the continuous SCL measures during each clip were transformed into five aggregated scores: (a) mean across the first 15 s of the first critical scene (i.e., averaged across 150 data points; Time 1); (b) mean across the rest of the first critical scene (Time 2); (c) mean between the first and second critical scene (Time 3); (d) mean across the first 15 s of the second critical scene (Time 4); and (e) mean across the rest of the second critical scene (Time 5). The rationale for selecting the first 15 s into each critical scene (Time 1 and Time 4) was to have a time window of the same duration across scenes that otherwise varied in length. In addition, the 80-s baseline measure was created by averaging across the 800 data points prior to the start of the first clip. No gender differences were found on any of these indices: baseline, F (1, 302) = 0.07, p = .78; violent clips, multivariate F (6, 296) = 1.70, p = .13; sad clips, F (6, 151) = 1.32, p = .25; funny clips, F (6, 138) = 1.86, p = .09.

Relations of Self-Reports of Emotional Arousal to SCL Indices of Arousal

Table 5 shows the partial correlations between self-reports of emotional arousal during the film clips and SCL arousal during the film clips, controlling for baseline SCL. The results show positive correlations between ratings of anxious arousal in response to violent films and SCL for all five consecutive points in time. Conversely, negative correlations were found between reported pleasant arousal and SCL levels across the five indices. In contrast, for viewing the sad and funny clips, none of the correlations between SCL arousal and self-reported pleasant or anxious arousal were significant. These results confer particular validity on the self-report measures of anxious and pleasant arousal while watching violent clips as accurate measures of the strength of emotional responses to such clips. While as Table 7 indicates, the participants showed just as much average SCL arousal to funny films as to violent films, SCL arousal from funny films did not translate into subjective experiences of pleasant (or anxious) arousal.

Partial Correlations of SCLs During Violent, Sad, and Funny Film Clips (Controlled for Baseline SCL) With Self-Reported Anxious Arousal and Pleasant Arousal During the Film Clips

	Type of film
	Anxious arousal			Pleasant arousal
SCL period	Violent	Sad	Funny	Violent	Sad	Funny
T1	.18	.12	.01	−.12	−.05	.05
T2	.19	.01	−.04	−.19	−.06	.01
T3	.17	−.05	−.04	−.15	.11	−.06
T4	.18	−.06	−.07	−.19	.12	.03
T5	.16	−.06	−.06	−.18	.12	.02

Note. N = 303 for the violent film; N = 158 for the sad film; N = 145 for the funny film. SCL = skin conductance level; T1 = mean across the first 15 s of the first critical scene; T2 = mean across the rest of the first critical scene; T3 = mean between the first and second critical scenes; T4 = mean across the first 15 s of the second critical scene; T5 = mean across the rest of the second critical scene.

Comparison of Mean SCL Arousal for Violent Films With Mean Arousal for Sad and Funny Films

SCL period	Violent film ( = 303)	Sad film ( = 158)	Funny film ( = 145)
T1	2.86 (0.58)	2.77 (0.61)	2.76 (0.53)
T2	2.85 (0.57)	2.69 (0.69)	2.73 (0.53)
T3	2.79 (0.55)	2.65 (0.64)	2.72 (0.54)
T4	2.79 (0.56)	2.65 (0.64)	2.72 (0.55)
T5	2.74 (0.56)	2.65 (0.64)	2.72 (0.55)

MANOVA comparison with violent clip		(5, 152) = 2.66, < .05	(5, 139) = 1.99, n.s.

Note . Means (shown with standard deviations) for violent and sad films are different at p < .05 for every SCL period; means for violent and funny films are not significantly different for any SCL period. SCL = skin conductance level; T1 = mean across the first 15 s of the first critical scene; T2 = mean across the rest of the first critical scene; T3 = mean between the first and second critical scenes; T4 = mean across the first 15 s of the second critical scene; T5 = mean across the rest of the second critical scene; MANOVA = multivariate analysis of variance; n.s. = nonsignificant.

The analyses addressing our hypotheses are reported in three steps: First, to examine the proposed links between habitual media violence usage and situationally induced arousal and affect, we report the bivariate correlations between past media violence exposure and physiological arousal (Hypothesis 1) as well as self-reported affect (Hypothesis 2) in response to the three types of films. Second, situational arousal and affect elicited by the violent clip are linked to aggressive cognitions and aggressive behavior, placing them in the context of other relevant predictors. A series of multivariate path analyses that includes trait aggression, trait arousability, and aggressive norms is reported to assess the independent contribution of desensitization to the prediction of aggressive cognitions and proactive/unprovoked as well as reactive/provoked aggression (Hypothesis 3). Finally, we contrast responses to the violent clips with those to the sad and funny clips to address the issue of the content specificity of desensitization (Hypothesis 4).

Relation of Media Violence Exposure With Physiological Arousal to Film Clips (Hypothesis 1)

To control for individual differences in characteristic SCL, we computed partial correlations (controlling for baseline SCL) between habitual media violence exposure and the five SCL indices into which the continuous SCL data were divided. As there were no gender differences in SCL reactions to the films, genders were combined for this analysis. The results are displayed in Table 6 . As predicted, habitual media violence exposure showed significant negative correlations with each of the five indices for violent clips, indicating that the more participants were used to media violence, the less physiological response they showed in the course of watching the violent clip. This finding supports the desensitization hypothesis for violent media. Table 6 further reveals that habitual exposure to media violence was also associated with reduced physiological arousal to sad scenes, indicating that habituation at the physiological levels in those who use a lot of media violence occurs for sad as well as violent content. However, media violence exposure did not correlate with SCL for funny films.

Partial Correlations of Habitual Media Violence Exposure With SCLs During Violent, Sad, and Funny Film Clips (Controlling for Baseline SCL)

	Type of film
SCL period	Violent ( = 303)	Sad ( = 158)	Funny ( = 145)
T1	−.14	−.22	.11
T2	−.17	−.19	.04
T3	−.19	−.16	−.04
T4	−.21	−.17	.00
T5	−.23	−.21	.03

Note . N = 303 for the violent film; N = 158 for the sad film; N = 145 for the funny film. SCL = skin conductance level; T1 = mean across the first 15 s of the first critical scene; T2 = mean across the rest of the first critical scene; T3 = mean between the first and second critical scenes; T4 = mean across the first 15 s of the second critical scene; T5 = mean across the rest of the second critical scene.

Relations of Media Violence Exposure With Self-Reports of Arousal to Film Clips (Hypothesis 2)

Our desensitization hypothesis predicted that the more participants habitually used media violence, the more pleasant and the less anxious arousal they would experience when viewing the violent clip. As shown in Table 4 , a positive correlation was found for both genders between media violence exposure and pleasant arousal. The correlations with anxious arousal were in the predicted direction but were only marginally significant for women and failed to reach significance for men. When the data from both genders were combined, media violence exposure correlated with self-reports of pleasant arousal to the violent clips, r (302) = .26, p < .001, and with self-reports of anxious arousal to the violent clips, r (303) = −.17, p < .01. The correlations of habitual media violence exposure with anxious and pleasant arousal following the sad and funny clips were nonsignificant: sad films: anxious arousal, r (158) = −.08, p = .35; pleasant arousal, r (158) = −.04, p = .57; funny films: anxious arousal, r (145) = −.11, p = .19; pleasant arousal, r (145) = .09, p = .31. Although, due to the smaller sample sizes, the power of these significance tests with sad and funny films is less than the tests with violent films, none of the obtained correlations would have been significant even if the sample size had been doubled. Thus, Hypothesis 2 is confirmed by the data.

Relations of Self-Reports of Arousal to Violent Film Clip With Situational Aggression (Hypothesis 3)

None of the five SCL indices of emotional arousal to violent clips correlated significantly with reaction times for aggressive words in the subsequent lexical decision task or with the intensity of noise blasts in the competitive reaction time task. Consequently, to investigate relations between arousal to the violent films and state aggression outcomes, we examined subjective appraisals by participants of the quality of their arousal in terms of anxiety or enjoyment.

From our theoretical perspective, individual differences in anxious and pleasant arousal while viewing violent clips should be related to individual differences in immediate aggression after viewing violent clips over and above the impact of dispositional variables, such as trait aggression, trait arousability, and normative acceptance of aggression. The pattern of correlations in Table 4 suggests that one needs to examine the relations in a multivariate context to be able to identify the unique role of desensitization. First, pleasant and anxious arousal correlated with each other, for women, r (88) = −.39, p < .001; for men, r (215) = −.43, p < .001. Second, trait arousability correlated positively with anxious arousal for both genders and negatively with pleasant arousal and positively with trait aggression for men. Third, trait arousability correlated negatively with media violence exposure in women but not at all in men. This suggests that one needs to test the relations with a multivariate model taking account of gender. To review, we had hypothesized that habitual exposure to media violence would be linked to reduced anxious arousal and increased pleasant arousal in response to violent film clips. Furthermore, we predicted that increased pleasant arousal and reduced anxious arousal in response to a violent film clip would be associated with lower reaction times for recognizing aggressive words and a greater readiness to engage in unprovoked aggressive behavior. The relations were hypothesized to be independent of the correlations of aggressive cognitions and behavior with trait aggression, trait arousability, and aggressive normative beliefs.

These hypotheses were examined with the three path analyses shown in Figure 1 , one for reaction time for recognizing aggressive words as the outcome variable, one for unprovoked aggression in the competitive reaction time task as the outcome, and one for provoked aggression as the outcome. The distinction between unprovoked and provoked aggression is critical for the present analysis, because the unprovoked aggression measure is thought to provide a more conclusive test of the role of habitual media violence exposure unaffected by the alleged actions of another person. On the basis of this conceptual argument, separate analyses were conducted for unprovoked and provoked aggression as outcome variables. Because trait aggression, aggressive beliefs, and trait arousability were shown above to be correlated with the key elements in the models, they were also included. The analyses were carried out with the Mplus software ( Muthén & Muthén, 2007 ).

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Path analyses predicting aggressive cognitions (top), unprovoked aggressive behavior (middle), and provoked aggressive behavior (bottom) as a function of arousal during the violent clips, self-reports of media violence viewing, and other dispositional variables.

First, the models were estimated as two-group models, with gender being the grouping variable to allow for gender differences. However, a comparison of the two-group models with the models without gender as a grouping variable on the basis of Bayesian information criterion scores showed no significant advantage in fit for the two-group models. Therefore, single-group models were estimated and are shown in Figure 1 . All three single-group models fitted the data well with nonsignificant chi-square values and cumulative fit indices above .99.

The path model for predicting aggressive cognition (reaction times for recognizing aggressive words) showed good fit, χ 2 / df = 1.07, p = .37, comparative fit index (CFI) = 0.99, root-mean-square error of approximation (RMSEA) = .02, standardized root-mean-square residual (SRMR) = .02. The more media violence participants used habitually, the shorter their reaction times in recognizing aggression-related words, independently of the remaining dispositional variables included in the model. Participants who watched more media violence scored significantly higher on pleasant arousal and nonsignificantly lower on anxious arousal. Greater pleasant arousal while viewing the violent clips was linked to shorter reaction times for recognizing aggressive words, but the path fell short of significance ( p < .10). The total effect of habitual media violence exposure on reaction times was −.20 ( p < .001), consisting of the direct link of −.17 ( p < .01) and a marginally significant indirect link via pleasant arousal of −.02 ( p = .07).

Anxious arousal predicted slightly longer reaction times, but the path was not significant. Anxious arousal was highly negatively correlated with pleasant arousal. These links were independent of the paths from trait arousability to higher anxious arousal and lower pleasant arousal. Overall, these results are consistent with the assumption that media violence exposure desensitized viewers so they responded with more pleasant arousal (highly correlated with less anxious arousal), which in turn increased the availability of aggressive cognitions. These processes operated in parallel with other independent pathways from trait aggression and media violence usage (e.g., observational learning) to increased accessibility of aggression cognitions.

The path model for unprovoked aggression in the laboratory task after exposure to the violent film clips also showed a good fit, χ 2 / df = .88, p = .49, CFI = 1.00, RMSEA = .00, SRMR = .02. Participants who viewed more media violence experienced significantly more pleasant arousal (.17, p < .001) while watching violent clips, which was highly negatively correlated (−.41, p < .001) with anxious arousal. Lower anxious arousal was significantly (−.14, p < .05) related to more unprovoked aggressive responding in the competitive reaction time tasks. Again, these links were independent of the significant paths from trait arousability on pleasant and anxious arousal in the film task and of trait aggression on unprovoked aggressive responding in the laboratory task. No significant indirect links via pleasant or anxious arousal were found for unprovoked aggression.

Finally, the path model for provoked aggression in the competitive reaction time revealed that lower anxious arousal and greater pleasant arousal to scenes of violence did not play a major role in reactive provoked aggression, χ 2 / df = 1.17, p = .32, CFI = 0.99, RMSEA = .03, SRMR = .02. Neither of the paths from the self-report arousal measures to the aggression measure were significant. The model also showed that normative beliefs approving of aggression were directly linked with provoked aggression. The direct link from trait aggression was not significant, but trait aggression was highly correlated with normative beliefs approving of aggression.

Examining the Content Specificity of Desensitization (Hypothesis 4)

Physiological arousal to the different kinds of film clips.

The means for the five SCL indices during the film clips are presented in Table 7 . The baseline SCL had a mean of 2.70 ( SD = 0.56). The five SCL scores for violent films were significantly higher than those for sad films, multivariate F (5, 152) = 2.66, p < .05, partial η 2 = .08 (all univariate effects significant at p < .05). The five SCL scores for the funny films were not significantly different from those for the violent films, multivariate F (5, 139) = 1.99, p = .09 (all univariate effects not significant). Thus, we conclude that the sad films stimulated less physiological arousal than the violent clips but the funny films stimulated about the same amount of physiological arousal as the violent clips.

Self-reports of arousal to the different kinds of film clips

According to our script theory of desensitization, media violence exposure should be associated with desensitization of anxious arousal to violent films and corresponding increases in pleasant arousal, but the desensitization should be specific to arousal during violent clips. To examine this prediction, we computed the mean arousal scores during the violent clips for high and low media violence viewers and compared those means with the mean arousal scores for high and low violence viewers during the sad and funny clips. To compare the means we conducted a mixed factorial multivariate analysis of variance with habitual media violence exposure (high vs. low; defined via median split) as between-subjects factor and film type as within-subjects factor, using the two arousal measures (anxious, pleasant) as dependent variables. Because only half of the sample watched the sad and funny comparison clips, respectively, separate analyses had to be conducted for comparing violent with sad and violent with funny films.

For the comparison of violent vs. sad films, the analysis yielded a significant multivariate effect of film type, F (2, 155) = 53.85, p < .001, partial η 2 = .41. Both univariate effects were significant, with violent films producing greater anxious arousal ( M = 1.75, SE = 0.14) than sad films ( M = 0.86, SE = 0.11), F (1, 156) = 38.69, p < .001, partial η 2 = .20. Violent films also produced less pleasant arousal ( M = 1.49, SE = 0.10) than did sad films ( M = 2.93, SE = 0.10), F (1, 156) = 95.46, p < .001, partial η 2 = .38. The multivariate main effect of habitual media violence exposure was also significant, F (2, 155) = 4.46, p < .05, partial η 2 = .05. Here, the univariate effect for anxious arousal was significant Participants with high media violence exposure reported lower anxious arousal ( M = 1.00, SE = 0.15) than did those low on habitual media violence exposure ( M = 1.61, SE = 0.14), F (1, 156) = 8.55, p < .001, partial η 2 = .05. The univariate effect for pleasant arousal was marginally significant ( M = 2.10, SE = 0.09, in the low media violence exposure group and M = 2.32, SE = 0.09, in the high media violence exposure group), F (1, 156) = 2.76, p < .10, partial η 2 = .02. However, the two main effects were qualified by a significant multivariate interaction effect, F (2, 155) = 4.68, p < .05, partial η 2 = .06. The means are shown in the top panel of Figure 2 . Follow-up t -tests indicated that the high and low media violence exposure groups differed significantly for the violent films but not for the sad films on anxious arousal, t (156) = 2.78, p < .01, and on pleasant arousal, t (156) = −3.23, p < .01. These findings indicate that, as we predicted, participants high in habitual exposure to media violence showed a more positive response to violent scenes than those low in media violence exposure, but the high and low media violence viewers showed no difference in their responses to sad films.

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Bar graphs comparing mean anxious and pleasant arousal during violent versus sad clips (top panel) and violent versus funny clips (bottom panel). MVE = habitual media violence exposure.

The comparison of violent and funny films also yielded a significant multivariate effect of film type, F (2, 141) = 369.47, p < .001, partial η 2 = .84. Both univariate effects were significant, with violent films producing greater anxious arousal ( M = 1.80, SE = 0.14) than funny films ( M = 0.07, SE = 0.04), F (1, 142) = 151.93, p < .001, partial η 2 = .52, and violent films also producing less pleasant arousal ( M = 1.48, SE = 0.12) than funny films ( M = 5.22, SE = 0.08), F (1, 142) = 712.07, p < .001, partial η 2 = .83. A second significant multivariate main effect was found for habitual media violence exposure, F (2, 141) = 6.57, p < .01, partial η 2 = .09. Both univariate effects were significant. Participants with high media violence exposure reported lower anxious arousal ( M = 0.68, SE = 0.11) than did those low on habitual media violence exposure ( M = 1.19, SE = 0.11), F (1, 142) = 10.81, p < .01, partial η 2 = .07. They also showed higher pleasant arousal ( M = 3.55, SE = 0.09, in the high exposure group, M = 3.16, SE = 0.11, in the low exposure group), F (1, 142) = 7.55, p < .01, partial η 2 = .05. However, the two main effects were qualified by a significant multivariate interaction, F (2, 142) = 4.66, p < .01, partial η 2 = .06, and both univariate effects were significant, F (1, 142) = 6.71, p < .05, partial η 2 = .05, for anxious arousal; F (1, 142) = 5.05, p < .05, partial η 2 = .03, for pleasant arousal. The means are shown in the bottom panel of Figure 2 . Follow-up t -tests indicated that the high and low media violence exposure groups differed significantly for the violent films but not for the funny films on anxious arousal, t (142) = 2.99, p < .01, and on pleasant arousal, t (142) = −3.08, p < .01. Again, these findings indicate that, as predicted, participants high in habitual exposure to media violence showed a more positive response to violent scenes than those low in media violence exposure, but media violence exposure did not affect responses to funny films.

Self-reported arousal and situational aggression

The final set of analyses compared the pathways from anxious and pleasant arousal to aggressive cognitions and behavior for the three film types in a set of multiple regression analyses. We predicted that the paths from emotional arousal during viewing the clips to subsequent aggressive cognitions and behavior should be specific to violent clips. The first analysis regressed reaction times for aggressive words (controlled for nonaggressive and nonwords) on anxious arousal in response to violent and funny films. The analysis showed that anxious arousal to violent films significantly predicted reaction times for aggressive words (β = .21, p < .05; the higher the anxious arousal, the longer it took to recognize an aggressive word), but anxious arousal to funny films did not predict reaction times (β = .03). The second analysis examined pleasant arousal to violent and funny films. Pleasant arousal to violent films significantly predicted reaction times for aggressive words (β = −.23, p < .01; the higher the pleasant arousal, the less time it took to recognize aggressive words), but pleasant arousal to funny films did not predict reaction times (β = .11). Finally, for the sad films neither anxious arousal (β = .01) nor pleasant arousal (β = −.03) predicted reaction times for aggressive words. In combination, the findings indicate that individual differences in responsiveness to emotionally arousing material had a content-specific effect on the accessibility of aggressive cognitions and could not be demonstrated for other arousing stimuli.

A parallel set of regression analyses was conducted for unprovoked aggressive behavior as an outcome variable. Higher anxious arousal to violent clips predicted significantly lower levels of unprovoked immediate aggression (β = −.23, p < .01), but higher anxious arousal to funny clips (β = −.06) and sad clips (β = −.03) did not. Similarly, higher pleasant arousal to violent films predicted significantly higher levels of unprovoked immediate aggression (β = .17, p < .05), but again pleasant arousal to sad films did not (β = .06), though pleasant arousal to funny films did predict significantly lower aggressive behavior (β = −.19, p < .05). These findings support the hypothesis that the likelihood of aggressive behavior is increased by desensitization to violent scenes and generally not predicted by desensitization to other kinds of scenes.

A last set of regression analyses compared the three types of film as predictors of provoked aggression. Anxious arousal to violent, sad, or funny films failed to predict provoked aggression, and pleasant arousal to violent and sad clips was also unrelated to provoked aggression. The only significant finding was that pleasant arousal to funny films was negatively related to provoked aggression (β = −.19, p < .05), paralleling the finding for unprovoked aggression.

In summary, the majority of our predictions were confirmed by the data. Fully supporting Hypothesis 1, habitual media violence exposure showed consistent negative associations with SCL measured at five points in time during exposure to a violent film clip. Partial support was found for Hypothesis 2 predicting lower anxious arousal and higher pleasant arousal to the violent film in participants high on habitual media violence usage. The predicted direct links were found for pleasant arousal but not for anxious arousal. Hypothesis 3 predicted that participants showing higher pleasant arousal and lower anxious arousal to the violent film would respond faster to aggressive words in a lexical decision task and show more unprovoked aggression in the competitive reaction time task. This prediction was confirmed for the link between pleasant arousal and response latencies to aggressive words and for the link between anxious arousal and unprovoked aggression, lending partial support to the hypothesis. Finally, Hypothesis 4, predicting that the links between habitual media violence usage, responses to the film clips, and aggressive thoughts as well as behavior would be dependent on the violent content and not found for other emotionally charged media stimuli, was also mostly supported by the data.

The debate about the potential of media violence to increase aggression is far from being over, as reflected in a recent issue of Psychological Bulletin ( Anderson et al., 2010 ; Bushman et al., 2010 ; Ferguson & Kilburn, 2010 ; Huesmann, 2010 ) and in a 2008 special issue of the American Behavioral Scientist , in which Grimes, Anderson, and Bergen (2008) accused “causationists” of “the attempt of making ideology a science” (p. 213). The present research was not designed to settle this question, although we believe that the prior research strongly favors the conclusion of causation. Rather, the present research was designed to investigate the role that emotional desensitization to depictions of violence might play as a potential process variable in the link between media violence and aggression. The study explored desensitization both as an outcome of habitual media violence usage and as a situational antecedent of aggressive cognitions and behavior. Furthermore, it included both SCL and subjectively experienced affect as indicators of desensitization and considered both negatively and positively valenced affective responses. Finally, it compared violent clips with two other types of arousing media stimuli, namely, sad and funny films, to examine the content specificity of the effects.

In support of our hypotheses and in line with previous research, reviewed in the introduction, the findings provide some support for the desensitization hypotheses. Our findings suggest that the more individuals habitually used violent media contents, the less physiological reactivity they showed to a violent film clip presented to them in a laboratory setting. For women there was also a significant link between greater habitual media violence exposure and greater pleasant arousal in response to the violent film. For men, the correlation was in the same direction but was only marginally significant. For men there was a significant correlation between greater habitual media violence exposure and more rapid accessibility of aggressive cognitions after viewing the violent film clip. For women, the correlation was in the same direction but was only marginally significant.

Although significant correlations were found between SCL and the subjectively experienced ratings of anxious and pleasant arousal, when examined on their own, physiological responses reflecting the intensity of arousal turned out to be unrelated to subsequent aggressive cognitions and behavior. The failure to find any links of SCL with aggressive cognitions and behavior ties in with prior research that found little evidence of a link between physiological arousal and laboratory-induced aggression ( Patrick & Verona, 2007 ). Research on psychopathy points to a link between habitual electrodermal hyporeactivity and higher aggression ( Scarpa & Raine, 2007 ) as well as low anxiety combined with higher information processing deficits (for a review see Fowles, 2000 ). However, the short-term variations in SCL observed in the present study did not covary with differences in aggressive cognitions and behavior. Our data suggest that it is the qualitative aspect of arousal that is needed to understand the role of desensitization by negative affect and sensitization by positive affect in aggressive cognitions and behavior following exposure to violent media stimuli. When we examined self-reports of emotional reactions to the films, we found that anxious arousal to the violent clip was lower and pleasant arousal was higher among heavy users of media violence than among low media violence users, also indicating that habitual media violence usage is linked to desensitization of negative and sensitization of positive affect in response to violent media stimuli.

In moving beyond bivariate relationships to examine the role of media violence usage in the context of other dispositional predictors of aggressive cognitions and behavior, path analysis was used. This is a common approach in research designed to identify the specific contribution of media violence exposure to aggression-related outcome variables controlling for other relevant predictors (e.g., Ferguson et al., 2008 ). For response latencies in the lexical decision task, a significant direct path was found from habitual media violence exposure to recognition times for aggressive words. In addition, there was evidence of an indirect pathway through higher pleasant arousal which in turn showed a marginally significant negative link with recognition times. For unprovoked aggression as outcome variable, no direct or indirect links were found with habitual media violence exposure, but a significant negative link was found with anxious arousal. Of the dispositional measures, trait aggression was positively related to unprovoked aggression. Finally, in the path model for provoked aggression, the trait of acceptance of aggression as normative was the only significant predictor. Neither habitual media violence exposure nor the affective responses to the violent clips were significantly related to provoked aggression.

Although not all predicted links between habitual media violence exposure, situational arousal, and aggressive cognitions and behavior were confirmed, the present data provide significant support for the claim that habitual users of media violence become desensitized to violence as evidenced in higher self-reported pleasant arousal to scenes of violence in the media. There is also some indication that differences in pleasant arousal, associated with differences in habitual media violence exposure, affect the speed with which individuals access aggressive cognitions and the likelihood of engaging in unprovoked aggression in the noise blast task. Results were less conclusive with respect to the role of reduced anxious arousal. Lower anxious arousal in response to the violent clip predicted higher scores of unprovoked aggression, but the level of anxious arousal in our study was unrelated to habitual media violence exposure. There was no evidence in the present data that emotional responses to the violent film were related to provoked aggression or that SCL measures of physiological arousal were linked to the aggression-related outcome variables.

The associations observed between media violence exposure, emotional responses to the film clips, and aggression-related outcome variables were specific to violent media stimuli and were not apparent for other emotionally charged stimuli, such as sad or funny film clips. Lower anxious arousal and higher pleasant arousal to violent clips but not to sad or funny clips predicted faster recognition of aggressive words. Lower anxious arousal to violent but not to sad or funny clips predicted higher unprovoked aggression, as did higher pleasant arousal to violent but not to sad films. One exception was the finding that habitual media violence exposure was not only correlated with reduced physiological arousal to the violent film clips but also correlated with reduced arousal to the sad clips. The latter finding can be attributed to the conceptual overlap between the themes of violence and death in the violent and sad clips. Violent media stimuli are closely related to the theme of death, and the two sad film clips used in our study centered on the death of a beloved person, so the finding that reduced responsiveness at the physiological level was also found for the sad clips is compatible with the desensitization hypothesis. Another unexpected result was that higher pleasant arousal to funny films predicted reduced aggression. However, this result is consistent with the theory that when emotions incompatible with aggression are stimulated, aggression becomes less likely ( Tyson, 1998 ).

The links of pleasant and anxious arousal to the aggression outcomes occurred independently of the dispositional variables that were measured. Trait aggression showed independent direct paths on reaction times and unprovoked aggression; media violence exposure directly predicted the reaction time for recognizing aggressive words; trait arousability was a positive predictor of anxious arousal and a negative predictor of pleasant arousal; and normative beliefs approving of aggression directly predicted provoked (reactive) aggressive behavior. Also as expected, trait aggression was significantly correlated with media violence exposure and normative beliefs approving of aggression. The hypothesized paths from media violence exposure through arousal reactions to violent clips to the aggression outcomes occurred independently of these relations.

Physiological arousal to violent clips, as measured by SCL, was lower the more participants habitually used media violence. Within the experimental situation, SCL during the violent scenes was positively correlated with anxious arousal and negatively correlated with pleasant arousal. This finding fits with a study by Ravaja, Saari, Salminen, Laarni, and Kallinen (2006) , who analyzed patterns of SCL during video game play in relation to predefined positive and negative game events and found higher SCL responses to negative than to positive events. In understanding this pattern, dimensional models of emotion that differentiate between activation (physiological arousal) and valence (perceived pleasant or unpleasant quality; Ravaja, 2004 ) may be useful. In the dimensional model proposed by Larsen and Diener (1992) , for example, fear is regarded as an emotion that is high in activation and negative in valence, whereas happiness/satisfaction is considered to be of medium activation at the positive end of the valence dimension. Thus, fear/anxiety is seen as being associated with high activation, whereas happiness/satisfaction is seen as being associated with a lower level of activation. The negative correlation between subjective ratings of anxious arousal and pleasant arousal corroborates the theoretical conceptualization of the two emotional responses as opposite ends of the valence continuum. The dimensional model can also be used to explain the finding that the five SCL indices were higher during the violent clips than during the sad clips. Sadness and fear are both negatively valenced emotions but they differ in activation, with fear being at the high end and sadness being close to the midpoint of this dimension.

In our data, differences in physiological arousal during the violent film clips were unrelated to differences in the subsequent lexical decision and noise blast tasks, but differences in the qualitative indices of anxious and pleasant arousal mostly showed the expected relations with aggressive cognitions and behavior. The lack of relationships between SCL in response to violent films and subsequent aggressive cognitions and behavior is at odds with meta-analytic evidence by Anderson and Bushman (2001) . However, their analysis was restricted to interactive video games, whereas the present study involved passive reception of filmed violence. Studies comparing active playing of video games and merely observing the violent contents by watching the players showed that active playing produced higher levels of arousal than passive observation of identical content did ( Calvert & Tan, 1994 ). Furthermore, none of the seven studies included in Anderson and Bushman’s (2001) meta-analysis used SCL as a measure of arousal. Past research has been inconsistent with regard to the relationship between SCL and self-reported affect. Over a 3-week period, Ballard et al. (2006) found evidence of decreased reactivity to video game exposure (regardless of violent content) at the physiological level but not at the level of affective responses. Arriaga et al. (2006) compared both physiological arousal and affect over a much shorter game-playing period of 4 min, finding differences between violent and nonviolent game players in affective responses but not at the physiological level. Our study was more similar in design to the Arriaga study in that our film clips were of similar length to their game-playing periods, and we also found little evidence of desensitization at the physiological level but more evidence at the affective level. In any case, clarifying the relative contribution of physiological arousal and experienced affect is an important task for future research.

Several limitations must be noted about this study. The first is that whereas SCL was recorded continuously during exposure to the film clips, the qualitative measures of anxious and pleasant arousal were obtained immediately after the film clips had ended. Reliance on self-reports to yield these measures made continuous assessment impossible as it would have distracted from watching the films. Other methodological approaches, such as recording physical responses indicative of the quality of arousal, would be required to overcome this problem. The study by Ravaja et al. (2006) , who combined SCL with the electromyographic recording of facial muscle movements as a continuous measure of quality of arousal during video game playing, illustrates this possibility.

A second limitation was that transfer effects of reduced arousal during the violent clip to reduced arousal to depictions of real-life violence were not considered. Our focus was on the disinhibiting effect of reduced anxious reactivity on aggressive cognitions and behavior, but it would also be critically important to demonstrate that reduced negative affect as a result of exposure to media violence leads to reduced arousal by real-life violence and reduced empathy with victims. Carnagey et al. (2007) demonstrated that participants who had previously played a violent game showed less arousal in response to real-life violence than those who had played a nonviolent game. However, they presented the depictions of real-life violence immediately after the game-playing session, so nothing can be said on the basis of that study about the duration of desensitization, nor about any cumulative effects. Further research combining measures of habitual media violence exposure and situational desensitization are needed to clarify these issues.

Third, although the noise blast test is a tried and tested method of measuring aggression in the laboratory and there is evidence of a high convergence between laboratory and field studies of aggression ( Anderson, Lindsay, & Bushman, 1999 ), no inferences can be derived from the present laboratory data to aggression in natural contexts. In addition, unprovoked aggression was represented by a single-item measure due to the interactive design of the noise blast task, which makes all responses from the second trial onward contingent upon the initial response by the alleged opponent. Therefore, the findings should be substantiated by other measures of unprovoked aggressive behavior with known reliability. At the same time, this weakness should not obscure the fact that for the male participants at least, the measure of trait aggression, representing their “real-world aggression”, was correlated both with their habitual media violence exposure and with their aggressive behavior on the laboratory task.

Fourth, and perhaps most important theoretically, no short-term field or laboratory study can determine with certainty that the relation between an individual’s history of media violence exposure and current emotional reactions to violent clips is due to desensitization. A plausible alternative hypothesis will always be that dispositional factors promote both the different emotional reactions and the exposure to media violence. However, in the current study we controlled for the most plausible dispositional “third variables” that might be alternatives (trait aggression, trait arousability, and beliefs accepting aggression as normative) and found that habitual media violence exposure predicted desensitization independently of these dispositions.

Finally, the present study was limited in that only responses to passive media exposure were studied. A number of recent studies have looked at desensitization in response to violent video game usage that entails a much more active involvement of players. There is evidence from this research that immersion in the violent events of the game, for example by playing with a virtual reality device, is a critical variable with respect to arousal ( Arriaga et al., 2006 ), but it is as yet unclear how such increased arousal potential affects desensitization. Moreover, studies are needed that compare passive reception of and active involvement in violent events in the virtual reality of the media in terms of their desensitizing potential (see Ballard et al., 2006 ).

Despite these limitations, the present findings can provide some new insights into the dynamics of affective reactivity to media violence. Several, yet not all, of the findings support our theorizing that weakening fear and anxiety in response to media violence (and the concomitant increase in pleasant emotions) through repeated exposure promotes aggression-enhancing cognitions and, ultimately, the likelihood of initiating proactive aggressive behavior. Our results further suggest that the relations are contingent upon the violent content of the media stimuli, as evidenced by the comparison with sad and funny clips that are also emotionally arousing. The findings join a growing body of research directed at elucidating the processes by which exposure to violent media stimuli may impact aggression, moving on from the issue of whether or not media violence exposure is linked to aggression to a better understanding of the psychological mechanisms that may explain such a link.

Acknowledgments

The research reported in this paper was supported by German Research Foundation Grant Kr 972/8-1 to Barbara Krahé. The support of Annika Bergunde, Cathleen Kappes, Julia Kleinwa¨chter, Kaspar Schattke, and Jessica Wenzlaff is gratefully acknowledged.

1 Although different participants, if asked, might think of any one specific program as falling into multiple genres (e.g., action–adventure vs. military–war), this is unlikely to produce much difference in violence exposure scores when the participants are being asked about frequency of media genres. The self-reports of how often genres are used are more subjective self-perceptions that allow the same media game or movie to influence frequencies of multiple categories. For example, if asked about their viewing of war–military genres, participants who have watched The Matrix are likely to think of it as in that category. When asked about science fiction or action, the participants are likely to think of The Matrix as in those genres. Thus, self-reported viewing frequencies for all three categories are likely to be increased. However, because the overall violence viewing score for a participant is the average of the violence viewing scores for genres, the contribution to the participant’s overall violence viewing score will actually be lower than that for another participant who perceives The Matrix only as military–war, which has a higher violence rating. We consider this property of our rating system desirable, as perceiving a game or movie only in a more violent genre probably indicates more of a focus on the violence.

2 All film clips are available in both German and English and can be obtained from the first author.

3 The total length of the SCL measurement prior to the presentation of the film clips was 90 s. The first 10 s were discarded from the analyses to clean the data from fluctuations due to movements and orienting responses at the start of the recording, leaving a baseline period of 80 s.

Contributor Information

Barbara Krahé, Department of Psychology, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany.

Ingrid Möller, Department of Psychology, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany.

L. Rowell Huesmann, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan.

Lucyna Kirwil, Department of Social Psychology, Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, Poland.

Juliane Felber, Department of Psychology, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany.

Anja Berger, Department of Psychology, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany.

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How Violent Media Can Impact Your Mental Health

Carol Yepes / Getty Images

Violent Media & Aggresssion
Controversy
Violent Media & Mental Health
How to Help Your Child

When to Seek Therapy

One of the most studied—and most controversial—topics in media psychology is the impact of violent media on consumers, especially children. Violence in is movies, on television, in video games, and on the internet. It's also included in content aimed at kids, tweens, and teens, and therefore, it's no surprise that psychologists, parents, and media consumers, in general, are concerned about the impact it has on people.

As a result, ever since the advent of television decades ago, psychologists have investigated the possibility of a link between the consumption of violent media and increases in real-life aggression.

This article will explore the research on this topic including arguments for and against an association. In addition, this article will examine newer research that has found a relationship between exposure to violent content, especially via news media, and mental health issues, such as depression and anxiety .

Does Consuming Violent Content Lead to Increased Aggression?

Studies have consistently shown that media violence has an impact on real-life aggression . These studies use a diverse set of methods and participants, leading many experts on the impact of media violence to agree that aggression increases as a result of media violence consumption.

However, that doesn't mean exposure to media violence drives consumers to murder or other particularly violent acts. These studies explore different kinds of aggression, making the association the research has established between violent media and aggression more nuanced than it initially appears.

Evidence for a Link Between Violent Content and Aggression

Many experiments in labs have provided evidence that demonstrates that short-term exposure to violent media increases aggression in children, teenagers, and young adults. However, aggression doesn't always mean physical aggression. It can also mean verbal aggression , such as yelling insults, as well as thinking aggressive thoughts or having aggressive emotions.

There Varying Degrees of Aggression

Moreover, even physical aggression exists on a continuum from a light shove to something far more dangerous. As a result, people may become more aggressive immediately following exposure to media violence but that aggression manifests itself in a variety of different ways, a majority of which wouldn't be considered particularly dangerous.

Consuming Violent Media During Childhood May Result in Adult Aggression

More disturbing are the few longitudinal studies that have followed people over decades and have shown that frequent exposure to media violence in childhood results in adult aggression even if people no longer consume violent media as adults.

For example, one study found that frequent exposure to violent television at age 8 predicted aggressive behavior at ages 19 and 30 for male, but not female, participants. This effect held even after controlling for variables like social class, IQ , and initial aggressiveness.

Similarly, another study that surveyed 329 participants between the ages of 6 and 9 found that 15 years later the exposure of both males and females to television violence in childhood predicted increased aggression in adulthood. In particular, the 25% of study participants who viewed the most media violence in childhood were the most likely to be much more aggressive in adulthood.

These individuals exhibited a range of behaviors including:

Shoving their spouses
Beating people up
Committing crimes

This was especially true if they identified with aggressive characters and felt that television violence was realistic when they were children.

These findings suggest that frequent early exposure to television violence can have a powerful impact on individuals over time and well into their adult lives.

Why Is This Topic So Controversial?

So if there's so much research evidence for a link between media violence and real-world aggression, why is the debate over this topic ongoing? Part of the issue is one of definition.

Studies often define violence and aggression in very different ways and they use different measures to test the association, making it hard to replicate the results. Moreover, many researchers edit together media for lab experiments , creating a situation where participants must watch and react to media that bears minimal resemblance to anything they'd actually consume via TV, movies, or the internet.

As a result, even when these experiments find media violence causes aggression, the extent to which it can be generalized to the population as a whole is limited.

Of course, it would be naïve to think that consuming media violence has no impact on people, but it appears it may not be the most powerful influence. The effect of media violence is likely to vary based on other factors including personality traits, developmental stage, social and environmental influences, and the context in which the violence is presented.

It's also important to recognize that not all aggression is negative or socially unacceptable. One study found that a relationship between exposure to television violence and an increase in positive aggression, or aggression that isn't intended to cause harm, in the form of participation in extreme or contact sports.

Does Consuming Violent Media Lead to Mental Health Issues?

While psychologists have been studying the association between the consumption of violent media and increased aggression for well over 50 years, more recently, some have turned their attention to the impact of media violence on mental health concerns.

Consumption of Violent Media May Lead to Anxiety

Studies have demonstrated that there's a correlation between exposure to media violence and increased anxiety and the belief that the world is a scary place. For instance, an experimental investigation found that late adolescents who were exposed to a violent movie clip were more anxious than those who watched a nonviolent clip.

These findings suggest that the regular consumption of violent media could lead to anxiety in the long-term .

Constant Exposure to Violent Media Via Technology May Lead to Poorer Mental Health

Today, the violence shown on the news media may especially impact people's mental health. New technology means that violent events, including terrorist attacks, school shootings , and natural disasters, can be filmed and reported on immediately, and media consumers all over the world will be exposed to these events almost instantly via social media or news alerts on their smartphones and other devices.

Moreover, this exposure is likely to be intense and repeated due to the need to fill a 24-hour news cycle. Studies have shown that this kind of exposure, especially to acts of terrorism, has the potential to lead to depression , anxiety, stress reactions, substance use, and even post-traumatic stress (PTSD).

Plus, those who take in more images of a disaster tend to be more likely to experience negative mental health consequences. For example, in a study conducted shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, people who viewed more television news reports about what happened in the seven days after the event had more symptoms of PTSD than those who had viewed less television news coverage.

How to Cope With the Impact of Media Violence

Violence will continue to be depicted in the media and, for most adults, there's nothing wrong with watching a violent horror or action movie or playing a violent video game, as long as it doesn't impair your mental health or daily functioning.

However, if you feel you're being negatively impacted by the violence depicted in the media, especially after a disaster that's getting constant coverage on the news, the first solution is to stop engaging with devices that could lead to further exposure.

This means turning off the TV, and for anyone who frequently looks at the news on their computers or mobile devices, adjusting any settings that could lead you to see more images of a violent event.

How You Can Help Your Child

For parents concerned about children's exposure to violent media, the solution isn't to attempt to prevent children from consuming violence altogether, although limiting their exposure is valuable.

Instead, parents should co-view violent media with their children and then talk about what they see. This helps children become discerning media consumers who can think critically about the content they read, watch, and play.

Similarly, when a disturbing event like a school shooting happens it's valuable to discuss it with children so they can express their emotions and parents can put the incident in the context of its overall likelihood.

If a parent notices their child seems depressed or anxious after frequent exposure to media violence or an adult notices their mental health is suffering due to regular consumption of violent media, it may be valuable to seek the help of a mental health professional .

Anderson CA, Berkowitz L, Donnerstein E et al. The Influence of Media Violence on Youth . Psychological Science in the Public Interest . 2003;4(3):81-110. doi:10.1111/j.1529-1006.2003.pspi_1433.x

Huesmann LR, Eron LD. Television And The Aggressive Child: A Cross-National Comparison . Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.; 1986.

Huesmann LR, Moise-Titus J, Podolski C-L, Eron LD. Longitudinal relations between children's exposure to TV violence and their aggressive and violent behavior in young adulthood: 1977-1992 . Dev Psychol . 2003;39(2):201-221. doi:10.1037/0012-1649.39.2.201

Giles D. Psychology Of The Media . London: Palgrave Macmillan; 2010.

Giles D. Media Psychology . Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers; 2003.

Slotsve T, del Carmen A, Sarver M, Villareal-Watkins RJ. Television Violence and Aggression: A Retrospective Study. Southwest Journal of Criminal Justice . 2008;5(1):22-49.

Madan A, Mrug S, Wright RA. The Effects of Media Violence on Anxiety in Late Adolescence . J Youth Adolesc . 2013;43(1):116-126. doi:10.1007/s10964-013-0017-3

Pfefferbaum B, Newman E, Nelson SD, Nitiéma P, Pfefferbaum RL, Rahman A. Disaster Media Coverage and Psychological Outcomes: Descriptive Findings in the Extant Research . Curr Psychiatry Rep . 2014;16(9). doi:10.1007/s11920-014-0464-x

Ahern J, Galea S, Resnick H, Vlahov D. Television Images and Probable Posttraumatic Stress Disorder After September 11: The Role of Background Characteristics, Event Exposures, and Perievent Panic . Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease . 2004;192(3):217-226. doi:10.1097/01.nmd.0000116465.99830.ca

The Conversation. Here's How Witnessing Violence Harms Children's Mental House .

By Cynthia Vinney, PhD Cynthia Vinney, PhD is an expert in media psychology and a published scholar whose work has been published in peer-reviewed psychology journals.

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UConn KIDS (Kids in Developmental Science)

Violence in the media – psychologists study tv and video game violence for potential harmful effects.

Since TV was first introduced, parents, teachers, politicians, and mental health professionals have wanted to understand the impact of television, particularly focusing on children. Psychologists tend to refer to Bandura’s work in the 1970s on social learning and the tendency of learning as influenced by modeling and exposition. Upon years of study and assessment the National Institute of Mental Health came up with some major effects related to the exposition of violence including: (1) reduced sensitivity to pain and suffering of others, (2) increase fearfulness of the world, and (3) increased aggressive behavior towards others. Complementary research studies have also found that children who watch many hours of violence on TV tend to be more aggressive as teenagers and adults. These findings don’t necessarily imply that exposition to violence is a cause of aggressive behavior, but rather recognize it as a factor that may contribute to aggressive conduct.

Leaving TV aside, it’s important to consider how the video game realm contributes to violence as it doesn’t just limit itself to present violence, but to engage the user in virtual violent behaviors. Before addressing the subject of video games and violence, I think it’s important to recognize that according to statistics, approximately 97% of adolescents (ages 12-17) play videogames. This is interesting as it shows how almost every single adolescent is exposed to video games. It becomes more fascinating to note that the most popular videogames like Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto embrace violence or violent behaviors as their main objective. If we take 97% of adolescents and add it to the popular violent games we obtain interesting data that may lean towards violent videogames as a cause of aggressive behaviors.

According to new research studies conducted by psychologists, evidence in research suggests that exposure to violent videogames is a causal risk factor that can lead to aggressive behavior, aggressive affect, and decreased empathy and prosocial behaviors. Another research study proposes the idea that children are also influenced by other variables like mental health and family life. Children who are already at risk in these settings may be more likely to play violent video games. Although this data is compelling, it would be somewhat premature to conclude that violent video games are the cause of aggressive behavior. I would limit myself to say that violent videogames may be one of the causes of violent behaviors or conducts. To reach further conclusions, more research studies have to be considered. As for parents, I would advise close monitoring of what their adolescent children are exposed to in both TV and videogames. Personally, I would also consider the idea of monitoring the environment these adolescents are in as a negative influence enhanced by a violent videogame that may lead to negative outcomes.

Link to article: https://www.apa.org/research/action/protect

Violence in the Media and Entertainment (Position Paper)

The prevalence and impact of violence portrayed in media and entertainment have long been a topic of debate in the United States. In 1972, the U.S. surgeon general issued a special report on the large and growing body of evidence on the public health effects of media violence. 1 At the time, the report was largely focused on television as the prevailing form of media and entertainment in the United States. However, even as the landscape of media has changed throughout the intervening decades to include other forms of digital media and entertainment, the near-ubiquitous portrayals of violence in various forms of media have remained a topic of intense scrutiny.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has defined violence as “the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, which either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation.” 2 Violence occurs at an alarming rate in the United States. 3 Among Americans aged 15 to 34 years, two of the top three causes of death are homicide and suicide, and many of these deaths involve firearms. 4,5 In a given year, more U.S. children will die from gun violence than will die from cancer, pneumonia, influenza, asthma, HIV/AIDS, and opioids combined. 6 According to the Children’s Defense Fund, “U.S. children and teens are 15 times more likely to die from gunfire than their peers in 31 other high-income countries combined.” 7 In fact, the overall rate of firearm-related death or injury in the United States is higher than the rate in most other industrialized countries. 8 There were 39,740 firearm-related deaths in the United States in 2018, which averages to approximately 109 people dying each day from homicides, suicides, and unintentional deaths involving firearms. 5 Further, the number of nonfatal injuries due to firearms is more than double the number of deaths. 9

While multiple factors can lead to violent actions, a growing body of literature shows a strong association between the perpetration of violence and exposure to violence in media, digital media, and entertainment. This is a serious public health issue that should concern all family physicians, particularly as it affects young patients and their parents or guardians. Children, adolescents, and young adults consume digital media from a variety of sources, many of which are mobile, are accessible 24 hours a day, and offer both passive and active engagement. Many of these media platforms feature entertainment that contains significant doses of violence and portrays sexual and interpersonal aggression.

Multiple studies have shown either a strong association or a suspicion or suggestion of causality between exposure to violence in media and aggressive or violent thoughts, emotions, and behavior in those exposed. 10 It is incumbent on family physicians to recognize the intersectionality of risk factors for exposure to violence in media, digital media, and entertainment, particularly for vulnerable populations. For example, some studies have shown that independent risk factors for exposure to extremely violent movies include male gender, racial or ethnic minority status, low socioeconomic status, and poor school performance. 11

Call to Action

Family physicians have a unique opportunity to encourage safer use of digital media by working closely with patients and their parents or guardians during well-child and well-adolescent visits. They can connect patients and parents or guardians to resources to promote healthier habits, such as creating a family technology use plan that considers the quality and quantity of media being consumed at home. Family physicians can also engage in local, state, and national advocacy to highlight ongoing concerns regarding violence in media, digital media, and entertainment and support continued research in this field.

Physician Level

● Promote a family technology use plan. This allows parents and guardians to consider the quality and quantity of digital media that is consumed at home and establish guidelines for age-appropriate media exposure. 12 Parental use of digital media has been shown to influence media use behaviors in children. 13

● Increase personal knowledge of the types of digital media being consumed in households, particularly among children and adolescents.

● Encourage patients, children, families, and caregivers to participate in media education and media literacy programs.

● Encourage parents or guardians to monitor content and not to rely solely on media ratings or advisory labels. Parental monitoring has been shown to have protective effects on several academic, social, and physical outcomes for children, including aggressive behaviors. 14

● Advise adults to consume digital media with their children and help them process media violence. Recording programs in advance makes it possible to pause for discussion or processing.

● Consider asking questions regarding media use during well-child and well-adolescent visits, such as:

How much entertainment media does the child or teen consume each day?
Does the child or teen have a television or digital media access in their bedroom?

● Consider asking patients and parents or guardians about exposure to violence in digital media. If you identify heavy exposure (i.e., more than two hours daily), take additional history of aggressive behaviors, sleep problems, fears, and depression. Be ready to discuss the health risks associated with consumption of violent media.

● Work with patients and parents or guardians to create a list of healthy alternatives to consumption of violent media.

● Counsel parents or guardians and caregivers of children younger than two years of age to limit their child's screen time to no more than two hours a day. Discourage routine digital media exposure.

● Encourage use of technology that restricts certain content and turns off the device after a certain amount of time.

Practice Level

● Create a nonjudgmental and culturally proficient environment in which patients and parents or guardians can ask questions and express concerns.

● Provide and/or promote nonviolent media choices in outpatient waiting rooms and inpatient settings.

● Display promotional information for community media literacy education opportunities.

Education Level

● Become familiar with research on trends in media use and the effects of media violence on individuals.

● Align medical education and residency program training to deliver evidence-based information on the potential health effects of consumption of violent media.

● Expand current continuing medical education (CME) offerings to include evidence-based information on best practices to promote media education and healthy media consumption.

● Support the development of media literacy education programs that focus on understanding the divide between real and fictionalized violence on television, in movies, and in other forms of digital media, as well as the responsibility, complexity, and consequences of real-life violence. Media literacy programs have been shown to be effective in limiting the negative effects of media and exploring potential positive social uses of media. 14,15,16

Advocacy Level

● Partner with medical organizations, government entities, and educators to advocate to keep this issue on the public health agenda.

● Partner with families and community-based organizations to demand that media producers limit the amount and type of violence portrayed in mass media.

● Advocate for research funding to continue studying this topic.

● Advocate for enhancements to media rating systems to help parents or guardians and caregivers guide children to make healthy media choices.

Media Violence in the United States

The term “digital media” refers to all types of electronic data, including text, databases, images, audio, and video; it may also refer to the electronic devices that store the data and to the communications methods that transmit the data. 17 Examples include streaming video, messaging and social networking platforms, video games, television, music, music videos, and social media. The expansion of media to include more and more forms of digital media has made it easier to access and be exposed to portrayals of violence. The advent of the internet has further expanded the reach and impact of digital media by encouraging interactivity and group forming through media such as online gaming, virtual reality, digital art, and social media. 18

As the cost of televisions and other screen media devices has continued to drop in recent years, screen media, streaming media, and other digital media have become more accessible than ever. In the United States, 84% of households contain at least one smartphone, with the median U.S. household containing five connected devices (e.g., smartphone, laptop or desktop computer, streaming media device) and one in five households containing 10 or more of these devices. 19

For decades, watching television was the most common form of daily media consumption, but that changed in 2019, with time on the internet exceeding time spent watching television. 20 Research suggests that young people in the United States spend more time interacting with various digital media than in any other activity except sleeping, with a typical 8- to 18-year-old using some form of media for an average of 50 hours per week or more. 21 On average, U.S. teens spend more than seven hours per day consuming a variety of entertainment screen media (e.g., smartphone, social media, gaming, music) and 8- to 12-year-olds spend more than four hours per day. 22

Studies demonstrating an association between exposure to violence in the media and real-life aggression and violence began appearing in the 1950s. Since then, various government agencies and organizations have examined the relationship, reporting their findings in publications including the surgeon general’s 1972 report, a 1982 National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) review, and a joint statement on the impact of entertainment violence on children issued following a 2000 congressional summit. 1,23,24 In 2000, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released a report noting that media violence is a risk factor in shootings in school. 25 A 2003 review identified media violence as a significant causal factor in aggression and violence. 26 The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a 2007 report on violent programming on television and noted that there is “strong evidence” that exposure to violence through media can increase aggressive behavior in children. 27

These reports and others are based on a body of literature that includes more than 2,000 scientific papers, studies, and reviews demonstrating the various effects that exposure to media violence can have on children and adolescents. These include increases in aggressive behavior, desensitization to violence, bullying, fear, depression, nightmares, and sleep disturbances. 28,29,30 Some studies found the strength of association between consumption of violent media and these behaviors to be nearly as strong as the association between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, and stronger than the well-established associations between calcium intake and bone mass, lead ingestion and IQ, and failure to use condoms and acquisition of HIV. 31

Seventy-one percent of 8- to 18-year-olds have a television in their bedroom. 21 In addition, 50% of individuals in this age group access television content online and/or on mobile platforms during a typical day. 21 Researchers have found that 8- to 12-year-olds watch television programming for an average of 1 hour and 23 minutes per day and 13- to 18-year-olds watch for an average of 1 hour and 45 minutes per day, with approximately 19 minutes and 38 minutes of this time, respectively, spent viewing television content on other devices (e.g., computer, smartphone, tablet, MP3 player). 22

An average American youth will witness 200,000 violent acts on television before age 18. 32 Weapons appear on prime-time television an average of nine times each hour. 33 The violence depicted in television content is often considerable, even in programs not advertised as violent, and children’s shows are particularly violent. Watching Saturday morning cartoons used to be a common aspect of American life. Now, children can access cartoons on demand. Studies analyzing the content of popular cartoons noted that they contain 20 to 25 violent acts per hour, which is about five times as many as prime-time programs. 34 Overall, 46% of television violence occurs in cartoons. 35,36,37 Additionally, these programs are more likely to juxtapose violence with humor (67%) and less likely to show the long-term consequences of violence (5%). 34,35,36 Although some claim that cartoon violence is not as “real,” and therefore not as damaging, it has been shown to increase the likelihood of aggressive, antisocial behavior in youth. 38 This association makes sense in light of children’s developmental difficulty discerning the real from the fantastic. 39

Video Games

Nearly all American teens—97% of males and 83% of females—play video games. 40 Eighty percent of teens play at least three hours of video games per week on a game console, with 25% of teens playing 11 hours or more per week. 41 Additional exposure occurs among teens who identify as fans of competitive video gaming, or esports; among 14- to 21-year-olds, nearly as many identified themselves as esports fans as professional football fans. 42

Many video games contain violent content, and studies have shown a significant association between violent video game exposure and increased aggression, increased desensitization to violence, and decreased empathy. 43 Video games that involve assuming the roles of aggressors or soldiers offer players the opportunity to be “virtual perpetrators.” These games also reward players for successfully carrying out violent behavior. Studies have shown that the general effects of violence may be more profound when children play these interactive games than when they are exposed to violence in a more passive manner, such as when watching television. 44,45

Music plays a central role in the lives of many adolescents and young adults, helping them sort through their emotions, identify with peer groups, and develop a sense of self. Forty-seven percent of 8- to 12-year-olds listen to music every day, with an average of 43 minutes of listening time per day, and 82% of 13- to 18-year-olds listen to music every day, with an average of slightly more than two hours of listening time per day. 22

There have been fewer studies of the effects of violent portrayals in music than studies of violence in other forms of media. One study found a correlation between violent lyrics and aggressive thoughts and emotions, but not actions. 46 Additional studies have shown that individuals who prefer heavy metal or rap music are more likely to engage in risky behaviors, have lower grades in elementary school and during adolescence, and have a history of counseling in elementary school for academic problems, compared with peers who prefer other types of music. 47

Music videos have been sources of violent content for decades. Content analysis has shown that more than 80% of the violence in music videos is perpetrated by attractive role models and that music videos mainly depict acts of violence against women and people in minority groups. 48 In many music videos, violent scenes are of a sexual nature. In addition, artistic choices and editing may juxtapose violence with images such as beautiful scenery, potentially linking violence to pleasurable experiences. 49 Several studies that focused on violence in rap music found that this genre contains more violent content than other genres. They also found that viewers of rap music videos were more likely to accept the use of violence, to accept violence against women, and to commit violent or aggressive acts themselves. 49

Several researchers have described an increase in violent content in movies, despite a national rating system. For example, studies have found that 91% of movies on television contain violence, including extreme violence. 11,36 Although film ratings and advisory labels can help parents decide on movies to avoid, certain labels, such as “parental discretion advised” and the R rating, have been shown to attract children, especially boys. 33,35,36 In 2003, 10 million adolescents aged 10 to 14 years, including 1 million 10-year-olds, had been exposed to that year’s most popular R-rated film. 11 One study found that between 2012 and 2017, there were twice as many negative themes—most commonly associated with violence—as positive themes depicted in the 25 top-grossing R-rated films. 50 Researchers have also noted that the amount of gun violence in top-grossing PG-13 films has more than tripled since the introduction of the rating in 1985. 51 In 2012, PG-13 films actually contained more gun violence than R-rated films. 52 Further, violence is even present in movies that are not considered to be violent, such as animated films. 53

1. Surgeon General’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior. Television and growing up: the impact of televised violence. Report to the Surgeon General, United States Public Health Service. U.S. Government Printing Office; 1972. DHEW publication no. HSM 72-9090. Accessed October 16, 2020. https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/ext/document/101584932X543/PDF/101584932X543.pdf

2. World Health Organization. Definition and typology of violence. Accessed July 19, 2020.

3. American Academy of Family Physicians. Violence (reviewed and approved 2014). Accessed October 16, 2020. https://www.aafp.org/about/policies/all/violence-position-paper.html

4. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 10 leading causes of death by age group, United States -- 2018. Accessed July 19, 2020. https://www.cdc.gov/injury/images/lc-charts/leading_causes_of_death_by_age_group_2018_1100w850h.jpg

5. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Firearm violence prevention. Accessed October 20, 2020. https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/firearms/fastfact.html

6. Children’s Defense Fund. Protect children, not guns 2019. Accessed July 31, 2020. https://www.childrensdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Protect-Children-Not-Guns-2019.pdf

7. Children’s Defense Fund. The state of America’s children 2020. Accessed July 19, 2020. https://www.childrensdefense.org/policy/resources/soac-2020-overview

8. Gramlich J. What the data says about gun deaths in the U.S. Pew Research Center; 2019. Accessed October 16, 2020. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/16/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/

9. Fowler KA, Dahlberg LL, Haileyesus T, et al. Firearm injuries in the United States. Prev Med . 2015;79:5-14.

10. Huesmann LR. The impact of electronic media violence: scientific theory and research. J Adolesc Health . 2007;41(6 Suppl 1):S6-S13.

11. Worth KA, et al. Exposure of US adolescents to extremely violent movies. Pediatrics . 2008;(122)2:306-312.

12. American Academy of Pediatrics. Family media plan. Accessed October 19, 2020. https://www.healthychildren.org/English/media/Pages/default.aspx

13. Jago R, Sebire SJ, Edwards MJ, et al. Parental TV viewing, parental self-efficacy, media equipment and TV viewing among preschool children. Eur J Pediatr . 2013;172(11):1543-1545.

14. Gentile DA, Reimer RA, Nathanson AI, et al. Protective effects of parental monitoring of children's media use: a prospective study, JAMA Pediatr. 2014;(168)5:479-484. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/1852609

15. American Academy Pediatrics Committee on Public Education. Media education. Pediatrics . 1999;104(2):341-343.

16. Brown JA. Television “Critical Viewing Skills” Education: Major Media Literacy Projects in the United States and Selected Countries. Routledge; 1991.

17. PC Magazine Encyclopedia. Digital media. Accessed October 20, 2020. https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/digital-media

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(2004) (January 2022 COD)

IMAGES

(PDF) Television violence: 60 years of research
The violent terms people are searching for online
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(PDF) Television violence: 60 years of research
Television violence and violent behavior
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COMMENTS

The Impact of Electronic Media Violence: Scientific Theory and Research
Secondly, the effect size of media violence is the same or larger than the effect size of many other recognized threats to public health. In Figure 1 from Bushman and Huesmann , the effect sizes for many common threats to public health are compared with the effect that media violence has on aggression. The only effect slightly larger than the ...
Violence, Media Effects, and Criminology
Media Exposure and Copycat Crimes. While many scholars do seem to agree that there is evidence that media violence—whether that of film, TV, or video games—increases aggression, they disagree about its impact on violent or criminal behavior (Ferguson, 2014; Gunter, 2008; Helfgott, 2015; Reiner, 2002; Savage, 2008).Nonetheless, it is violent incidents that most often prompt speculation that ...
Violence in the media: Psychologists study potential harmful effects
However, later research by psychologists Douglas Gentile and Brad Bushman, among others, suggested that exposure to media violence is just one of several factors that can contribute to aggressive behavior. Other research has found that exposure to media violence can desensitize people to violence in the real world and that, for some people ...
Violent Media in Childhood and Seriously Violent Behavior in
Much of the research on exposure to violent media has focused on visual media, such as television, movies, and video games; 17,32,33 or aggregated exposure across types. 34 Less is known about aural influences, like violent music, although studies exist: In one longitudinal study of adolescents, listening to aggression in music was associated ...
The Facts on Media Violence
Published in JAMA Pediatrics, the review found that exposure to violent media increases the likelihood of aggressive behavior, thoughts and feelings. The review also found media decreases the ...
Early Exposure to TV Violence Predicts Aggression in Adulthood
However, much of the past research on media violence has focused on short-term effects and reported significant relations only for boys. This study draws on social-cognitive observational-learning theory, desensitization theory, and social comparison theory to examine the longitudinal relationship between early exposure to TV violence and adult ...
Aggression and Popular Media: From Violence in Entertainment Media to
For example, media violence exposure has been found to be positively related to more anger, a higher level of hostility, and increased accessibility to aggression-related concepts. Experimental studies on media violence effects have consistently demonstrated that short-term exposure to media violence can increase aggressive behaviors.
The Role of Media Violence in Violent Behavior
Abstract Media violence poses a threat to public health inasmuch as it leads to an increase in real-world violence and aggression. Research shows that fictional television and film violence contribute to both a short-term and a long-term increase in aggression and violence in young viewers. Television news violence also contributes to increased violence, principally in the form of imitative ...
Content Effects: Violence in the Media
Violent content appears frequently in screen and audio media and takes many forms, including physical and relational aggression, gory images, violent stereotypes, and cyberbullying. Over six decades of research demonstrates that different types of media violence have significant detrimental effects, both immediately and in the long term.
Reassessing the risks: an updated content analysis of violence on U.S
Karyn Riddle (Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara) is the Robert Taylor Professor in Strategic Communication in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research focuses on the psychology of media effects with an emphasis on the effects of exposure to media violence. Recent research has focused on the prevalence and effects of violent ...
Have recent studies addressed methodological issues raised by five
Controlling for other factors, Huesmann and Eron (1986) found that exposure to television violence was associated with later aggression for girls but not boys and Sheehan, 1986, Wiegman et al., 1985 found no association between TV violence exposure and aggression. In short, the relationship between exposure to media violence and aggression has ...
The influence of violent media on children and adolescents: a public
The notion that violence in the media contributes to the development of aggressive behaviour has been supported by meta-analyses 1 of relevant research. 2,3 However, there is continuing debate about (1) methodological approaches used in the research and their generalisability, and (2) the extent to which media violence affects children and young people. 4-8 This debate shows the typical ...
7
Desensitization to media violence has also been found to influence individuals' reactions to real life violence. In two experiments, Thomas, Horton, Lippencott, and Drabman (1977) had children and adults view either an 11-min excerpt from a violent program or nothing prior to watching videotaped scenes of "real life" vio- lence.
Violent media and real-world behavior: Historical data and recent
Related research: A 2015 research roundup, "The Contested Field of Violent Video Games," gives an overview of recent scholarship on video games and societal violence, including ones that support a link and others that refute it. Also of interest is a 2014 research roundup, "Mass Murder, Shooting Sprees and Rampage Violence."
PDF Media and Violence
media (KFF, 2010). The most comprehensive content analysis of TV violence - the National Television Violence Study - was conducted in the mid-1990s (Smith, Wilson, Kunkel, Linz, Potter, Colvin, &. onnerstein, 1998). It coded more than 10,000 hours of programming across 23 channels, including cable and broadcast networks, PBS, and daytime as ...
Does TV Make Us Violent?
New evidence links TV viewing to violent behavior. Teens and young adults who watch more than 3 hours of TV a day are more than twice as likely to commit an act of violence later in life, compared to those who watch less than 1 hour, according to a new study. The authors of this and similar studies say the causal link between TV and aggressive ...
The Impact of Electronic Media Violence: Scientific Theory and Research
Since the early 1960s, research evidence has been accumulating that suggests that exposure to violence in television, movies, video games, cell phones, and on the Internet increases the risk of violent behavior on the viewer's part, just as growing up in an environment filled with real violence increases the risk of them behaving violently. In the current review this research evidence is ...
Violent media use and aggression: Two longitudinal network studies
Violent media and aggression. In 2015, the American Psychological Association published a press release stating that playing violent video games is linked to aggression (APA, Citation 2015).This decision proved controversial, as some believe that there is no link between violent media and aggression (Ferguson et al., Citation 2020).In particular, it has been argued that experimental studies of ...
Desensitization to Media Violence: Links With Habitual Media Violence
Several studies have shown that in the long run, habitual exposure to media violence may reduce anxious arousal in response to depictions of violence. Research has found that the more time individuals spent watching violent media depictions, the less emotionally responsive they became to violent stimuli (e.g., Averill, Malstrom, Koriat ...
How Violent Media Can Impact Your Mental Health
Constant Exposure to Violent Media Via Technology May Lead to Poorer Mental Health. Today, the violence shown on the news media may especially impact people's mental health. New technology means that violent events, including terrorist attacks, school shootings, and natural disasters, can be filmed and reported on immediately, and media ...
Violence in the Media
Complementary research studies have also found that children who watch many hours of violence on TV tend to be more aggressive as teenagers and adults. These findings don't necessarily imply that exposition to violence is a cause of aggressive behavior, but rather recognize it as a factor that may contribute to aggressive conduct.
Effects of violence in mass media
The study of violence in mass media analyzes the degree of correlation between themes of violence in media sources (particularly violence in video games, television and films) with real-world aggression and violence over time.Many social scientists support the correlation, [1] [2] [3] however, some scholars argue that media research has methodological problems and that findings are exaggerated.
Violence in the Media and Entertainment (Position Paper)
For example, studies have found that 91% of movies on television contain violence, including extreme violence. 11,36 Although film ratings and advisory labels can help parents decide on movies to ...